Alzheimer Disease Associated With Greater Neural Flexibility
TUESDAY, Sept. 9, 2025 -- Alzheimer disease (AD) is associated with greater neural flexibility (NF) in older adults, according to a study published online July 17 in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.
Eleanna Varangis, Ph.D., from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and colleagues evaluated whether AD is associated with alterations in NF and evaluated its predictive utility for AD conversion. The analysis included 862 older adults (461 cognitively normal [CN], 294 with mild cognitive impairment [MCI], and 107 with AD) with valid resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative.
The researchers found that NF was significantly higher in AD than CN for global NF (β = 0.002), as well as NF in six networks. NF was also significantly higher in MCI than CN in the visual network. For 617 participants without dementia at baseline, 8.6 percent converted to dementia during the follow-up visits. This AD transition was positively associated with higher NF in the visual network (hazard ratio, 1.323 per one standard deviation in NF) when controlling for age, gender, and education.
"While this was only a modest effect, it is a good hint that activity in these visual regions may be telling us something about risk for Alzheimer disease years before formal diagnosis," Varangis said in a statement. "Since we think of cognitive impairment being the primary symptom of Alzheimer disease, the finding that this sensory network was the one that predicted Alzheimer conversion was a bit unexpected, but it wasn't necessarily surprising."
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