FDA To Give Alzheimer's Test to Living Patients?

One of the many frustrations of Alzheimer’s disease is the difficulty in pinpointing just who has it. According to printed research, as many as one in five individuals informed they have Alzheimer’s are mislabeled. A definitive analysis can be made only after dying, by an autopsy that reveals a particular buildup - referred to as amyloid plaques - in the patient’s brain. This week, however, the FDA will think about a brand new diagnostic test that could possibly identify those plaques through PET scans - a kind of mind scan - on living patients.

In a small research run by Avid Radiopharmaceuticals and made public Tuesday within the Journal of the American Medical Association, PET scans identified the telltale plaques in 97 % of patients who truly had them, as determined by a subsequent autopsy. The 35 patients in this part of the reasearch had been terminally ill, and agreed to each a mind scan and an autopsy.

The researchers also carried out PET scans on presumably healthy individuals to attempt to ensure that the test might tell the difference. It could. Of seventy four young and healthy folks tested, none had scans indicating Alzheimer’s.

Before performing a PET scan, a physician or technician injects the affected person with a radioactive dye that may be detected by the imaging equipment. The actual dye used in this test was developed by Avid and is known as Florbetapir F 18. Chief Executive Officer Dr. Daniel Skovronsky says Florbetapir F 18 binds tightly to the amyloid proteins - making them visible to the scanner - but doesn’t bind to different tissue.
According to Skovronsky, analysis of Alzheimer’s still is dependent upon a clinician who can evaluate a patients total condition, however he says the test with Florbetapir could possibly be especially helpful as a device to rule out Alzheimer’s. In that scenario, a patient who reveals symptoms of dementia could be given a PET scan; a unfavourable result would push her doctor to consider other conditions.

A second paper in JAMA suggests that a simple, low-priced blood check can inform whether a person is at risk for cognitive decline, which is a precursor to Alzheimer’s.

Throughout a span of 10 years, researchers checked the blood of 997 elderly folks in Memphis, Tennessee and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, testing for 2 types of proteins which can be associated with Alzheimer’s. They re-tested every individual at 1-year, 3-year, 5-year, 8-year and 10-year intervals. Patients with lower levels have been significantly more likely to suffer cognitive decline over time.

Researchers also discovered that patients with more “cognitive reserve” while healthy, are much less prone to decline. “Cognitive reserve” is measured in various ways - for instance, by years of education attended, or performance on intelligence tests. The researchers say it may be that people with greater intelligence or more education are capable of higher compensate for functions lost to early cognitive decline.