Olfactory Neural Network Disruption in Alzheimers Disease (AD): A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study

Prasanna Karunanayaka¹, Megha Patel¹, Jian-Li Wang¹, Sarah Molitoris¹, Paul Eslinger², Qing X. Yang¹

Patients with Alzheimers Disease (AD) and Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) usually exhibit olfactory deficits. It has been shown that these deficits occur well before the appearance of overt memory loss. Therefore, olfactory-related network studies have received considerable attention in recent years. However, a majority of these studies have not employed advanced neural network analysis techniques and instead emphasized on a few olfactory-related brain regions. The approach presented in this paper highlights the advantage of analyzing olfaction in terms of cognitive modules that can capture the underlying network dynamics.