PET agent unlocks door to Alzheimer's disease
A PET agent built around fluorine-18 readily and safely distinguished the brains of Alzheimer's disease patients from those of healthy volunteers in a clinical trial at Johns Hopkins University.
A PET agent built around fluorine-18 readily and safely distinguished the brains of Alzheimer's disease patients from those of healthy volunteers in a clinical trial at Johns Hopkins University.
Dr. Dean F. Wong, a professor of radiology and psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, and colleagues plugged F-18 into a compound known as florbetapir F-18, which is drawn to the beta-amyloid in Alzheimer's plaques. The compound has a half-life of about 110 minutes.
Testing the new compound in humans, Wong and his colleagues recruited 26 volunteers, 11 previously diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease and 15 healthy subjects of similar age who performed normally on cognitive tests. Each volunteer received a florbetapir PET scan, acquired over 90 minutes. The Alzheimer's patients showed significantly more of the agent in their brains than the healthy volunteers with the radiotracer accumulating in regions known to be associated with beta-amyloid deposits.
The Reading Room Podcast: Current Perspectives on the Updated Appropriate Use Criteria for Brain PET
March 18th 2025In a new podcast, Satoshi Minoshima, M.D., Ph.D., and James Williams, Ph.D., share their insights on the recently updated appropriate use criteria for amyloid PET and tau PET in patients with mild cognitive impairment.
Study with CT Data Suggests Women with PE Have More Than Triple the One-Year Mortality Rate than Men
April 3rd 2025After a multivariable assessment including age and comorbidities, women with pulmonary embolism (PE) had a 48 percent higher risk of one-year mortality than men with PE, according to a new study involving over 33,000 patients.
