Tau PET agent accurately diagnosis Alzheimer’s from other neurodegenerative diseases
In patients with diagnosed Alzheimer’s disease (AD), [18F] flortaucipir PET imaging proved accurate in distinguishing AD from other neurodegenerative diseases, according to a multicenter study published in JAMA.
Rik Ossenkoppele, PhD, with Lund University’s clinical memory research Unit in Lund, Sweden, and colleagues measured [18F]flortaucipir uptake in more than 700 patients with established diagnoses. They found flortaucipir PET achieved both sensitivity and specificity of about 90 percent for AD compared to other neurodegenerative diseases.
All 719 patients were from three dementia centers in South Korea, Sweden and the U.S. Of the total, 160 had cognitively normal controls, 126 with mild cognitive impairment, 179 patients had AD dementia and 254 had various non-AD neurodegenerative disorders.
The tau-PET technique also proved more accurate than MRI and produced fewer false positive results than beta-amyloid PET.
"The method works very well,” said corresponding author, Oskar Hansson, MD, PhD, in a statement. “I believe it will be applied clinically all over the world in only a few years."
Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative disorders often produce symptoms with similar origins, making it a diagnostically challenging disease for clinicians, Ossenkoppele et al. wrote.
Amyloid-β (Aβ) biomarkers recommended to aid clinical diagnoses have also proven unreliable largely due to early abnormal formation of Aβ 15 to 30 years prior to a dementia diagnosis. These biomarkers are often used to “rule out rather than rule in a diagnosis of AD,” the authors wrote.
Overall, the authors believe their PET amyloid imaging method may prove to be a valuable tool in diagnosing dementia patients.
“An intended clinical use of [18F] flortaucipir PET might be to improve the diagnostic workup as an add-on test to Aβ biomarkers in patients with early-onset dementia and possibly as a triage or even replacement test in patients with late-onset dementia in whom incidental Aβ pathology is common,” the authors concluded.
Matt joined Chicago’s TriMed team in 2018 covering all areas of health imaging after two years reporting on the hospital field. He holds a bachelor’s in English from UIC, and enjoys a good cup of coffee and an interesting documentary.