Alzheimer's linked to less shared information in brain signals
An observational analysis of 41 people with Alzheimer's, 84 with memory-related mild cognitive impairment and 44 healthy controls found less overlapping information in Alzheimer's.
Limit: The analysis did not track individual changes in brain information sharing over time
Edited by Boris Djordjevic · AgingResearch.News
In this observational study, researchers analyzed resting brain recordings from 95 healthy adults aged 20–35 and 93 aged 60–80, including women and men. A separate sample included 41 people with Alzheimer's disease, 84 with memory-related mild cognitive impairment and 44 healthy controls. The latter two groups were aged 60 or older.
Electroencephalography, which records the brain's electrical activity, captured alpha rhythms in the default mode network, a set of brain regions active at rest. Information shared across frontal, temporal and parietal regions—and its overlapping-information component—was lower in older than younger adults and in Alzheimer's than either comparison group. In the Alzheimer's-spectrum sample, higher values were linked to better cognitive test scores. Models using these measures distinguished Alzheimer's from the other groups better than measures examining regions in pairs.
Why it matters
Brain-network communication changes with aging and Alzheimer's. The authors call for testing whether these measurements complement established Alzheimer's biomarkers.
Caveats
The observational group comparisons cannot establish causes or track individual changes over time. Classification used cross-validation within the study sample, and no tested model separated mild impairment from healthy controls better than chance.
- Alzheimer's disease
- Amnestic mild cognitive impairment
- Montreal Cognitive Assessment
- Mutual information rate
- O-information rate
- Humans
The paper
Centre for Addiction and Mental Health
Alzheimer's Research & Therapy, Jul 15, 2026, Open access
