Identifying healthy individuals with Alzheimer’s disease neuroimaging phenotypes in the UK Biobank

Spotting people with dementia early is challenging, but important to identify people for trials of treatment and prevention. We used brain scans of people with Alzheimer’s disease, the commonest type of dementia, and applied an artificial intelligence method to spot people with Alzheimer’s disease. We used this to find people in the Healthy UK Biobank study who might have early Alzheimer’s disease. The people we found had subtle changes in their memory and thinking to suggest they may have early disease, and we also found they had high blood pressure and smoked for longer. We have demonstrated an approach that could be used to select people at high risk of future dementia for clinical trials.