Brain Flexibility at Rest May Signal Alzheimer’s Risk

Some regions of the brain in people with Alzheimer’s reorganize more often while at rest than in people without the disease, and in healthy people, this frequent reshuffling sometimes predicts who will develop the condition later, according to a new study from the University of Michigan and Columbia University. The brain’s ability to reorganize various regions is called neural flexibility. Scientists found that neural flexibility was significantly higher in the Alzheimer’s group than in the cognitively normal group across all brain regions and in six specific networks, and neural flexibility was significantly higher in the mild cognitive impairment group than in the cognitively normal group in the visual network.