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March 28, 2018Received in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease , the discovery could revolutionize both early diagnosis and therapies for this form of dementia, shifting attention to drugs that stimulate dopamine release.

The author of the study is Annalena Venneri , of the Sheffield Institute for Translational Neuroscience (SITraN) in Great Britain, who explains: "our discovery indicates that if the tegmental-ventral area (VTA) does not produce the correct amount of dopamine for the hippocampus , this no longer works efficiently "and the formation of memories is compromised. This is the first study in the world to demonstrate this connection in human beings.

Venneri and Matteo De Marco of the University of Sheffield performed cognitive tests and magnetic resonances on 29 patients with Alzheimer's, 30 subjects with mild cognitive decline and 51 healthy people, finding a correlation between size and function of VTA with the size of the hippocampus and cognitive functions of the individual. The smaller the VTA, the smaller the size of the hippocampus and the ability of the subject to learn and remember.

The discovery comes one year after the results of laboratory experiments conducted at the Ircss Santa Lucia and the Campus Bio-Medico University of Rome. Coordinated by Marcello D'Amelio , the study (in Nature Communication ) also highlighted the effect of the non-release of dopamine by the VTA on an aspect that often accompanies the disease from its earliest stages: the loss of personal motivation.

"We are administering 'agonist-dopaminergic drugs' - explains Giacomo Koch, Director of the Experimental Neuropsychophysiology Laboratory of the Capitoline IRCCS - to patients with Alzheimer's disease to observe whether these drugs stimulate brain plasticity and therefore the preservation of cognitive faculties".

"This discovery can potentially lead to a new way of understanding screening for the elderly population in the event of very early Alzheimer's signs, changing the way in which the diagnostic scans of the brain are acquired and interpreted using different tests for memory", concludes Venneri .