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Alzheimer’s Disease and Mild Cognitive Impairment: New Insights from Imaging
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Diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease with [18F]PET in Mild and Asymptomatic Stages
Alexander Drzezga
1,21Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Charlestown, MA, USA
2Department of Nuclear Medicine, Klinikum rechts der Isar, Technische Universität München, Munich, Germany
Abstract
With longer life expectancy, dementia based on the age-related Alzheimers’ disease (AD) has turned into one of the most prevalent disorders of older age, representing a serious medical and socio-economic issue. There has been growing interest in early diagnosis of this disease, particularly regarding the initiation of new treatment strategies ahead of the onset of irreversible neuronal damage. It is accepted that the pathologic changes underlying AD appear in the brain years to decades before the symptomatic stages. Consequently, clinical measures of cognitive impairment, as used for definition of dementia, will not allow early diagnosis of AD-pathology in the mild or asymptomatic stages. Thus, a need for complementary sensitive biomarkers is apparent. Brain imaging markers are among the most promising candidates for this diagnostic challenge. Particularly, [18F]FDG PET as a marker of regional neuronal function has been demonstrated to represent a most sensitive and specific method for early identification of AD-pathology and thus for prediction of dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT), even in the mild and asymptomatic stages. Currently, systematic data of comparable quality are hardly available for any other imaging procedure. The purpose of this article is to describe the typical findings of [18F]FDG PET in different stages of AD and to demonstrate its value for early and reliable diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease, particularly ahead of the stage of dementia of the Alzheimer’s type.
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 Hindawi Publishing Corporation and the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
