URI Neuroscientist Explores Retinal Scanning to Detect Early-Stage Alzheimer’s
URI researcher Jessica Alber is advancing retinal imaging as a low-cost, minimally invasive tool for early Alzheimer’s detection
Jessica Alber, Ph.D., associate professor of biomedical and pharmaceutical sciences and George and Anne Ryan Institute for Neuroscience faculty member at the University of Rhode Island, is working to change the way physicians diagnose Alzheimer’s disease, a change that could open new possibilities for treatment.
Alber received a five-year, $10.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to support her work using retinal imaging to screen for early changes associated with Alzheimer’s disease. The project, “Longitudinal Validation of Retinal Biomarkers Against Cerebral Imaging in Preclinical Alzheimer’s Disease,” could help provide a low-cost, minimally invasive screening technique to detect the disease before symptoms appear.
“The retina allows us to look at what might be changing in the brain in a cost-effective and minimally invasive way to identify people who are at high risk but not sick yet.”Jessica Alber, Ph.D.
While there are limited treatment options that can modestly slow the course of the disease, new developments in drug and lifestyle therapies indicate potential for success with earlier intervention. Yet one of the primary challenges in treating the disease is that it is difficult to diagnose. Clinicians can use positron emission tomography scans or lumbar punctures to detect the buildup of amyloid and tau proteins, or “plaques and tangles”, that are hallmarks of the disease, but these procedures are invasive and expensive.
Using retinal imaging as a “window to the brain,” Alber and her collaborators aim to develop a more affordable and accessible screening tool that could one day be part of a routine eye exam.
“In the near future, screening for risk in the general population will become increasingly important in order to treat people before they experience the devastating loss in quality of life and cognitive function that affects them and their families,” Alber said. “The retina allows us to look at what might be changing in the brain in a cost-effective and minimally invasive way to identify people who are at high risk but not sick yet.”
Alber’s study also explores the potential for using blood plasma biomarkers in tandem with retinal imaging to improve the detection of early-stage disease. “We don’t know yet if blood biomarkers can be used to identify preclinical disease, but we have seen some exciting developments in this area,” Alber said. The study began in 2022, and Alber and her team recently completed baseline data collection to validate retinal biomarkers against gold-standard brain imaging and blood tests.
The ARIAS 2 study team is led by Alber and includes collaborators from multiple institutions, including Butler Hospital’s Memory and Aging Program, Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine, The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, the University of North Texas Health Science Center, and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, as well as industry partner Heidelberg Engineering.
Founded in 2013, the George and Anne Ryan Institute for Neuroscience at URI focuses on investigating underexplored factors in Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative disorders.
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