[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
FW: PET imaging in Alzheimer's Disease
> FYI: a recent newsworthy article Concerning PET imaging of Alzheimer's:
>
> Wednesday January 9 4:03 PM ET
> New Imaging Agent Shows Alzheimer's in Patients
> By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent
>
> WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A new imaging agent that homes in on the gummy
> plaques and tangles that jam up the brains of Alzheimer's patients has
> allowed doctors to see the disease in a living person for the first time,
> researchers said on Wednesday.
>
> They saw the messy clumps of dead cells in the brains of nine living
> Alzheimer's patients. The disease, which is always fatal and has no cure,
> can now only be definitively diagnosed by looking at the brain after a
> patient has died.
>
> The finding means that Alzheimer's, which affects 4 million Americans and
> millions more around the world, may be diagnosed in the early stages, when
> treatments might be able to do some good, said Jorge Barrio of the
> University of California Los Angeles, who helped lead the study.
>
> The method might also be useful in testing whether treatments for
> Alzheimer's are working, Barrio said.
>
> ``This discovery will help us select appropriate patients for treatment
> trials and studies aimed at disease prevention,'' Barrio said in a
> telephone interview.
>
> Barrio said his team made the finding by accident. They were working to
> develop an agent that could be used to help pick out proteins in general.
>
> The researchers are specialists in nuclear medicine, which uses
> radioactive compounds to help make images of the body. They designed and
> built a molecule called FDDNP.
>
> To his surprise, Barrio found that FDDNP had a specific affinity for the
> neurofibrillary tangles and beta-amyloid plaques found in the brains of
> Alzheimer's patients.
>
> They tested the compound first in laboratory dishes, then in animals.
> Writing in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, they said they
> finally tested it in nine Alzheimer's patients and seven healthy
> volunteers.
>
> After injecting FDDNP, they used positron emission tomography (PET) scans,
> which can show how tissue is acting by measuring its use of sugar for
> basic energy.
>
> SCANS SHOW CLEAR LESIONS
>
> The scans clearly showed lesions in the areas of the brain associated with
> Alzheimer's.
>
> Then one of the patients died, and Barrio's team was able to examine the
> brain. Indeed, the patient had damage in the areas suggested by the scan,
> and clearly had Alzheimer's.
>
> ``This is a huge step forward in getting a jump on the disease before it
> progresses to cause brain impairment,'' Dr. Stephen Bartels, president of
> the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry, said in a statement.
>
> Barrio said his team planned to apply to the U.S. Food and Drug
> Administration (news - web sites) (FDA) for a license to use the method to
> check at-risk people for Alzheimer's.
>
> By the time symptoms of Alzheimer's show up -- memory loss, confusion and
> other problems -- a patient already has considerable brain damage, Barrio
> said.
>
> But studies show the disease starts years before, and progresses without
> showing symptoms. Studies have also shown that people who take
> aspirin-related drugs such as naproxen and ibuprofen regularly have a
> lower risk of Alzheimer's.
>
> Barrio said his team used their FDDNP-PET scan to show that these two
> drugs also home in on and attack the plaques, which may explain why they
> seem to prevent Alzheimer's. What they may be doing, Barrio said, is
> stopping the damage while it is still in its early stages.
>
> Patients who show early signs of the disease with the scans might be able
> to take daily doses of naproxen or ibuprofen and arrest or at least slow
> the disease, he speculated.
>
> His team is developing other molecules that may work even better, Barrio
> said.
>
> ``I have been in contact with the pharmaceutical industry, of course,
> about these issues,'' Barrio said. ``Every single one I know has a drug or
> two in the pipeline for Alzheimer's disease (news - web sites).''
>
> Submitted by,
> M Iannaccone,
> mario.iannaccone@state.ma.us
>
************************************************************************
You are currently subscribed to the Radsafe mailing list. To unsubscribe,
send an e-mail to Majordomo@list.vanderbilt.edu Put the text "unsubscribe
radsafe" (no quote marks) in the body of the e-mail, with no subject line. You can view the Radsafe archives at http://www.vanderbilt.edu/radsafe/