In Vivo Assay of Cortical Microcircuitry in Frontotemporal Dementia: A Platform for Experimental Medicine Studies
The analysis of neural circuits can provide crucial insights into the mechanisms of neurodegeneration and dementias, and offer potential quantitative biological tools to assess novel therapeutics. Here the researchers used behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) as a model disease.
They demonstrated that inversion of canonical microcircuit models to noninvasive human magnetoencephalography, using dynamic causal modeling, can identify the regional- and laminar-specificity of bvFTD pathophysiology, and their parameters can accurately differentiate patients from matched healthy controls.
The research team suggests that this approach provides an in vivo platform for testing mechanistic hypotheses about disease progression and pharmacotherapeutics.