Finding the cause of memory loss

It wasn't planned, but Alzheimer's disease has become a recurrent theme in the career of physicist Serge Rombouts, Professor of Cognitive Neuroimaging at the LUMC and the University's Institute of Psychology. He received a PhD in 1999 for a technique using an MRI scanner to visualise the brain activity of Alzheimer's patients, and dementia has continued to crop up in many of his projects ever since. The ultimate aim: to use a brain scan to determine whether someone has dementia, in addition to the interviews and memory tests that doctors use to reach a diagnosis. 'The problem is that at an early stage Alzheimer's disease has all sorts of similarities with other forms of dementia,' says Rombouts. 'You want to distinguish between these at as early a stage as possible, and this diagnosis is also useful if you want to try out new treatments.