SCIENTISTS have discovered the functions of the area of the brain in which Alzheimer's disease begins - offering hope for the development of future treatments.
Alzheimer's is the commonest form of dementia with more than 520,000 people in Britain and Northern Ireland suffering.
The first symptoms people exhibit are problems remembering things that happened to them, called `episodic memory'.
New research carried out at the Universities of St Andrews and Edinburgh, focused on one of the first brain areas to show changes in Alzheimer's - the lateral entorhinal cortex (LEC).
In order to understand the early stages and develop treatments that can prevent degeneration within the brain, researchers said it was important to study how the brain supported episodic memory and how damage could result in episodic deficits.
The LEC is made up of layers of cells which form complex networks of connections with other brain regions and contains sub-systems that have different memory functions.
The research team, led by Dr Brianna Vandrey now of Edinburgh University, found that when a particular connection between one of the layers of the LEC and the hippocampus part of the brain malfunctions, episodic memory is affected while simpler forms of memory remain unaffected.
Dr James Ainge of the School of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of St Andrews said the research was important as "it gives us a very specific target when developing treatments and strategies to prevent neurodegeneration in Alzheimer’s disease".
