Improved Alzheimer Diagnosis
So far, establishing an accurate Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis used to be challenging in many ways: It often came too late for many patients to have a relevant impact on treatment decisions, it suffered from certain insecurities as compared to the post mortem histopathology gold standard, and it was – in parts – invasive. Nuclear brain imaging now offers to overcome these limitations. This comes right in times, as we currently observe first promising developments regarding Alzheimer’s disease therapy.
One important example on how nuclear imaging is of help in this regard refers to the recently approved amyloid PET tracers. These are able to detect beta-amyloid plaques in the brain grey matter of patients with Alzheimer’s disease with high accuracy. Multi-centre studies in Europe and the USA, like the AMYPAD and the IDEAS studies, are currently underway to investigate whether and how this imaging technique improves patient outcome. This kind of evidence is essential for the desired broader use of amyloid imaging in clinical routine.
Further, there is currently a new exciting development of so-called second generation tau PET tracers. These tracers promise to non-invasively visualize tau aggregates, another histopathological hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease despite amyloid plaques. The first-generation tau tracers were limited in this regard due to a limited dynamic range as well as significant off-target or unspecific binding. Different novel alternative tracers are under testing these days which seem to be able to overcome the above limitations.
These fascinating new developments by the nuclear medicine community will hopefully allow not only improving early and differential diagnosis of dementia in clinical routine, but also streamlining respective drug testing, all to the good of Alzheimer’s disease patients. The recent research results in this brain imaging field will be discussed at the so-called Focus 2 Meeting “Molecular Imaging of Dementia – The Future is Here” which will take place from January 31st to February 2nd, 2019 in Cannes (France). This meeting will be organized by the EANM Neuroimaging Committee and it will bring together leading international experts in the field. For more information on this meeting, see https://focusmeeting.eanm.org.
Henryk Barthel, EANM Neuroimaging Committee