Topic: Applying spectroscopy techniques combined with biospectroscopy to categorize

and diagnose Alzheimer's disease.

One of the greatest challenges facing existing Alzheimer's disease (AD) diagnostic
tests is the development of high-throughput, low-cost, minimally invasive, and quick
tools that can be employed in real time. Chemical spectroscopy techniques combined
with biological spectroscopy techniques have shown the necessary characteristics to
identify pathological changes in AD before the appearance of the first symptoms. In this
article, I only focus on highlighting research in the use of infrared spectroscopy (IR) and
nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) techniques combined with biological spectroscopy.
With content ambition of the paper must be consistent with the program being studied
and meet the requirements of the topic, which is to categorize and diagnose AD.
1) NMR:
Metabolism is conserved during evolution; metabolic networks are essentially very
similar in rodents and human beings. It suits a major requirement for becoming an ideal
tool for translational research; metabolic patterns associated to pathology or therapeutic
responses in animal models could be directly transferred to the clinical setting. When we
deal with translational medicine issues, cost assessments should be taken into account. In
this sense, metabolomic approaches are cheap on a per-sample basis and therefore they
have been widely used in toxicology screening. Thus, Magnetic resonance spectroscopy
(MRS) evaluation techniques of metabolic parameters are safe and non-invasive,
providing an excellent opportunity to perform in vivo studies in AD mouse models and
human patients. In this sense, longitudinal studies are obviously of particular interest.
MRS is also very versatile. It is possible to measure several different molecules and
parameters by using either endogenous (for example, brain function could be related to
the redox state of iron in deoxyhemoglo-bin) or exogenous contrast agents (31P-, 13C-, 1H-
MRS). It is worth noting that MRS-based metabolomics is more reliable compared to
currently used neuropathological protocols in AD diagnosis, which are highly observer-
and protocol-dependent. Finally, MRS-based metabolomics is able to tackle a single
problem at both the molecular and systems level.