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Measures are needed that identify persons that will develop Alzheimer's disease in order to target them for preventative interventions. There is evidence from animal, pathological and imaging studies that disruption of white matter occurs in the course of Alzheimer's disease and may be an early event. Prior studies have suggested that late-myelinating regions or white matter connecting limbic structures are particularly susceptible to degradation. Persons destined to develop the disease by virtue of fully penetrant genetic alterations (familial Alzheimer's disease or FAD) provide a model in which early and even presymptomatic changes of the disease may be identified. In this study we performed diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) on 2 demented and 21 subjects at-risk for inheriting an FAD mutation. We compared global and localized fractional anisotropy (FA) measures in white matter between FAD mutation carriers …