The Obama Administration announced new efforts to fight Alzheimer’s disease on Feb. 7, including immediately making an additional $50 million available for Alzheimer’s research. In addition, the administration said that its FY 2013 budget will boost funding for Alzheimer’s research by $80 million.
Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm and AstraZeneca have formed a three-year collaborative research agreement that will apply molecular imaging technologies to generate new diagnostic imaging tools.
18F-flutemetamol PET imaging demonstrates strong concordance with histopathology irrespective of timing and sequence of exams in prospective and retrospective settings, and shows promise as a valuable tool to study and possibly facilitate diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, both in patients with suspected normal pressure hydrocephalus, and among the wider population, according to a pooled analysis of four studies presented at the 2012 Human Amyloid Imaging (HAI) conference in Miami, Fla.
The Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH) Biomarkers Consortium has released biomarker data from studies intended to improve the ability to diagnose and measure the progression of Alzheimer’s disease.
CHICAGO--Image interpretation will need to include quantitative analysis in the future, according to a session on Nov. 30 at the 97th Scientific Assembly and Annual Meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).
CHICAGO – Mechanistic imaging, which leverages imaging to understand the pathophysiology of disease, will project the specialty of radiology another leap forward, said A. Gregory Sorensen, MD, co-director of Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and CEO of Siemens Healthcare USA, during the Pendergrass New Horizons Lecture Nov. 28 at the 97th Scientific Assembly and Annual Meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).
The University of South Florida (USF) has opened the Center for Memory C.A.R.E. (Clinical Assessment, Research and Education), on the second floor of the six-story USF Health Byrd Alzheimer’s Institute, to support patients and their caregivers.
Compared with changes in biomarkers, changes in cognitive abilities appear to be stronger predictors of whether an individual with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) will develop Alzheimer’s disease, based on research published in the September issue of Archives of General Psychiatry.
Ronald Petersen, MD, director of the Mayo Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center and the Mayo Clinic Study of Aging, was selected to chair the Advisory Council on Alzheimer’s Research, Care and Services. The formation of the group was announced Aug. 23 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.
18F-florbetaben had high sensitivity for Alzheimer’s disease (AD), clearly distinguished patients with frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) from AD and provided results comparable to those reported with 11C-Pittsburgh Compound B in a variety of neurodegenerative diseases, according to a study in the August issue of the Journal of Nuclear Medicine.
A $2 million upgrade to an x-ray analytical device was completed through a collaboration with Eli Lilly's research arm and the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory.
Researchers continue to make headway in grasping the biological nature of Alzheimer’s disease, with a recent study discovering significant increases in the beta-amyloid uptake of florbetapir F18 as viewed on PET, published July 11 in the Archives of Neurology.
The automated measurement of temporoparietal brain region volumes is a highly accurate predictor of memory loss in healthy elderly persons, indicating that these underlying characteristics could help clinicians identify likely cases of pre-clinical Alzheimer’s and enable them eventually to prevent the disease’s progression, according to an article published in the June issue of Radiology.
Researchers have been well aware of the high likelihood that individuals suffering from memory loss will convert to Alzheimer’s, but now physicians have a way of predicting an individual patient’s risk of developing the disease, according to an April 6 study published in Radiology. This closes a research gap that crippled early detection and the induction of therapeutic trials for Alzheimer’s.
Written by Manjula Puthenedam, PhD, & Mary C. Tierney, MS
FDG-PET is highly accurate in diagnosing progressive neurodegenerative disease such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD) even if cognitive dysfunction is only mild. Thus, novel brain imaging probes targeting, for instance, beta-amyloid will likely serve a different purpose. They will play an important role if beta-amyloid is confirmed as a molecular target of effective therapy, and drugs that target beta-amyloid are actually developed.
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