Quantitative analysis of the cerebelum in Alzheimer's disease patients: MRI based morphometric study

Nowadays, developing living conditions lead to an increase in the elderly population. The incidence of neurodegenerative diseases is also increasing due to the increasing elderly population. The most common neurodegenerative disease is Alzheimer's disease, the most common form of dementia. Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a disease that affects more than 50 million people and their relatives worldwide and impairs the standard of living. AD shows many functional and cognitive symptoms. There is no definitive treatment and diagnosis method for AD, which threatens human life so much. In addition, recent studies have proved that AD causes pathophysiological and anatomical changes in various regions of the brain. In this study, we compared the cerebellar volume and thickness on magnetic resonance (MR) images of healthy individuals with AD. Thus, we tried to reveal the anatomical changes that AD may cause in the cerebellum, an important part of the brain. Our study was a retrospective study and the patient group consisted of 30 (thirty) individuals aged 65 years and over diagnosed with AD. The control group was selected from 60 (sixty) subjects aged 65 years and over who underwent MRI examination for a reason other than AD. The AD group and the control group were divided into 6 subgroups according to the World Health Organisation (WHO) classification of old age and 4 subgroups according to gender. Volumetric measurements of the cerebellum of these 90 patients were made with VolBrain software and cortex cerebelli thickness was determined. Statistically significant differences were found in the measurements between the group with AD and the control group.