Many degrees of separation in dementia brains

YOU might expect the brain of someone with a mental disorder to be disorganised. But it’s the nature of the disorganisation that’s important – a finding that one day could help early diagnosis of different types of dementia.

We already know that the different regions of healthy brains are linked in a so-called small-world network, which makes communication very efficient. For people with Alzheimer’s or other types of dementia, however, it’s a different story.

In small-world networks – which…