Dr. Lisa Mosconi

Lecture by Dr. Mosconi Honors Dr. Michael Freedman, Pioneer in Geriatrics

Honoring a pioneer of geriatric medicine, the late Michael Freedman, MD, professor emeritus of medicine, an Alzheimer’s Disease Lecture was held on January 15. Dr. Freedman, founder of the Department of Medicine’s Division of Geriatrics, died in February. He was the author of nearly 200 scientific papers investigating the biology of aging, dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease. His wife, Cora, and children, Lawrence and Deborah, joined faculty members and other distinguished guests in Farkas Auditorium to hear the presentation, given by Lisa Mosconi, PhD, research assistant professor of psychiatry.

Dr. Mosconi discussed several of her ongoing studies on the use of positron emission tomography (PET)—a safe and painless brain-imaging technique—to better understand the cause and course of Alzheimer’s. A progressive and fatal brain disease causing severe memory loss, Alzheimer’s affects 5.3 million Americans. The early-onset form, affecting 1 to 2% of all cases, stems from mutations in three specific genes. It’s the more common late-onset variety, in which symptoms appear after age 65, that intrigues Dr. Mosconi. For many years, this type was associated mostly with aging and environmental influences such as diet and education, but the researchers have identified a familial component to late-onset Alzheimer’s.

Dr. Mosconi has identified distinctive markers of the disease that are discernible in PET scans long before the patient notices any symptoms. In 2007, they discovered that healthy participants whose mothers have Alzheimer’s show a marked decrease in glucose metabolism in the same brain regions that people with the disease do. This characteristic PET signature did not appear in participants with a paternal history or no family history of Alzheimer’s. Last year, the researchers further showed that in people with maternal history, this specific metabolic abnormality worsens over time.

Now, with the support of grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Alzheimer’s Association, the team is homing in on a second kind of marker. Postmortem studies of people with Alzheimer’s show that it causes a build up of a protein called amyloid-beta in the brain. Using a PET tracer that binds to the amyloid-beta plaques, Dr. Mosconi is looking for differences in amyloid accumulation over time among people with maternal, paternal, and no family history of disease. Down the line, she says, these markers could be used together to assess an individual’s risk and perhaps—with smart interventions—to prevent disease.