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By Nancy Lapid, Health Science Editor

Hello Health Rounds readers! While there's been no shortage of warnings about risky advances in artificial intelligence, today we highlight a potential benefit of AI: the ability to detect brain changes, or "invisible" injuries, in college athletes who play contact sports that would be missed by traditional MRI scans. We also highlight a large study that found a multivitamin a day might keep memory loss at bay in older adults. Another study found not allowing prediabetes to progress to type 2 diabetes reduces dementia risk later in life.

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In college athletes involved in contact sports who have never been diagnosed with concussion, artificial intelligence detects brain changes that aren't visible on conventional imaging scans. REUTERS/Clodagh Kilcoyne.

Artificial intelligence will someday help doctors see brain injuries that do not show up on conventional imaging studies, researchers say.

The researchers used machine learning to analyze hundreds of brain images from 36 college athletes who played contact sports involving head impacts and 45 college athletes who competed in non-contact sports.

They found those involved in contact sports had tiny structural changes in their brains even though they had never been diagnosed with concussion, according to a report published on Monday in The Neuroradiology Journal. No such changes were seen in the brains of athletes who performed non-contact sports.

"Our results highlight the power of artificial intelligence to help us see things that we could not see before, particularly 'invisible injuries' that do not show up on conventional MRI scans," study leader Junbo Chen of NYU Tandon School of Engineering said in a statement. "This method may provide an important diagnostic tool not only for concussion, but also for detecting the damage that stems from subtler and more frequent head impacts."

Study coauthor Dr. Yvonne Lui of NYU Langone Health noted that both groups of athletes would be expected to have similar brain structure, so the results highlight the potential added brain risk of certain sports.

The current study involved only male athletes. Chen said the researchers will next explore the use of their machine-learning technique for examining head injury in female athletes.

Daily multivitamins slowed age related memory decline in seniors, and especially in those with heart disease, in a randomized, controlled trial, researchers found.

After 12 months, memory had improved for people taking a daily multivitamin compared with those taking a placebo, and the improvement was sustained, on average, for the three-year study period, according to a report published on Wednesday in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

The vitamin group's memory performance was improved by an equivalent of 3.1 years of age-related memory change, the researchers estimated.

More than 3,500 adults over age 60 participated in the trial. At the start, and annually for the next three years, they performed cognitive assessments designed to test memory function in the hippocampus, an area of the brain affected by normal aging.

Another recent trial comparing multivitamins and placebo in more than 2,200 older adults found similar results, the researchers noted.

In both trials, the benefits of the vitamins were most pronounced in participants with heart disease.

"There is evidence that people with cardiovascular disease may have lower micronutrient levels that multivitamins may correct, but we don't really know right now why the effect is stronger in this group," study leader Adam Brickman of Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York said in a statement.

"The finding that a daily multivitamin improved memory in two separate (studies) ... is remarkable, suggesting that multivitamin supplementation holds promise as a safe, accessible, and affordable approach to protecting cognitive health in older adults," coauthor Dr. JoAnn Manson of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston said in a statement.

Keeping prediabetes from progressing to full-blown type 2 diabetes can reduce patients' risk of dementia later in life, especially in younger people, a new study suggests.

Previous research has suggested that prediabetes is linked with greater risks for cognitive decline and dementia, but the new study suggests that much of that risk is limited to people who go on to develop diabetes.

In prediabetes, patients have elevated blood sugar levels that are not enough for a diagnosis of diabetes but that indicate a higher risk for the disease.

Researchers reviewed data on 11,656 middle-aged participants without diabetes at baseline, including 2,330 with prediabetes. By age 80, dementia had developed in 15% of those with prediabetes compared with 10% in those without. By age 90, those rates were 63% and 53%, respectively, according to a report published on Wednesday in Diabetologia.

Overall, those with prediabetes had a 12% higher risk of developing dementia, but among those with prediabetes who didn't eventually develop diabetes, the odds of dementia were no higher than in the general population, the researchers found.

The link between progression to diabetes and dementia was strongest in younger individuals.

The risk for dementia was 23% higher when prediabetes progressed to diabetes between ages 70 and 79, 73% higher when diabetes developed between ages 60 and 69, and nearly 300% higher when prediabetes progressed to diabetes before age 60.

More than 80% of people with prediabetes do not realize they have it, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Improving early detection and working with patients to prevent or delay the progression to prediabetes "may have long-term population benefits for dementia prevention," the study authors concluded.

This newsletter was edited by Bill Berkrot.

Additional reporting by Shawana Alleyne-Morris.

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