Predicting the transition from normal aging to Alzheimer's disease: A statistical mechanistic evaluation of FDG-PET data

We demonstrated for the first time the reliability of a single global index of order in discriminating groups of cognitively impaired patients with different clinical outcome. The second relevant finding was the identification of clusters of regions relevant to AD pathology progressively separating from the first principal component through different stages of cognitive impairment, including patients cognitively impaired but not converted to AD. This paved the way to the quantitative assessment of the functional networking status in individual patients.