A subtle change in your breathing could help predict Alzheimer’s disease, a new study has shown.
Researchers found patients with the disease take shorter, shallower breaths than people without dementia.
The average rate was 17 breaths per minute for those with Alzheimer’s and 13 breaths per minute for those without.
The researchers say this is possibly a result of damaged blood vessels in the brain that connect with deeper nerve tissue elsewhere in the body to provide oxygen.
The finding gives doctors another area to go at when diagnosing Alzheimer’s.
Professor Aneta Stefanovska from Lancaster University in the UK which led the research, said of the findings: ‘This is an interesting discovery – in my opinion a revolutionary one – that may open a whole new world in the study of Alzheimer’s disease.
‘It most likely reflects an inflammation, maybe in the brain, that once detected can probably be treated and severe states of Alzheimer’s might be prevented in the future.’
Dr Bernard Meglič from the University of Ljubljana Medical Centre in Slovenia and the clinical coordinator of the study, said the findings could also pave the way for more effective treatments of Alzheimer’s disease, with blood flow and brain oxygen levels being the focus.
A subtle change in your breathing could help to predict Alzheimer’s years in advance , a groundbreaking new study has shown
The researchers say that further investigations are also needed to confirm ‘whether or not a higher respiration rate is common in Alzheimer’s disease patients’ and when these changes in breathing patterns start.
While the average breathing rate for the Alzheimer’s patients was higher than the study participants who did not have the condition, it was not abnormally high.
The Cleveland Clinic notes that the normal respiratory rate for an adult at rest is 12 to 18 breaths per minute.
A respiration rate under 12 or over 25 breaths per minute while resting may be a sign of an underlying health condition, the experts say.
Some of the health conditions that can affect your respiratory rate include asthma, anxiety, pneumonia and heart disease.
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The most recent findings from the Lancaster University study have been published in the journal Brain Communications.
A study previously suggested that Alzheimer’s could be stopped or even reversed by putting patients in oxygen chambers.
Israeli researchers studied six older people with mild cognitive impairment, an early stage of memory loss that is a pre-cursor to the most common form of dementia.
Their symptoms improved after having five 90-minute oxygen treatments a week for three months, scientists found.
The treatment – called hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) – involves patients inhaling oxygen through a mask in a pressurized chamber.
It is used by athletes to help them recover quicker and celebrities who claim it beats stress.
It significantly increases the amount of oxygen in bodily tissues, which advocates say encourages healing.
And when the treatment was administered to mice, it removed amyloid plaques from the brain, which are a tell-tale sign of Alzheimer’s.
The experts believe the therapy works by changing the structure of vessels in the brain and increases blood flow. Reduced blood flow to the brain has already been linked with the onset of dementia.‘
