AMYPAD

Deposits of beta amyloid protein in the brain are a common sign of Alzheimer’s disease. IMI’s AMYPAD project is studying the value of using positron emission tomography (PET) imaging to scan people’s brains for beta amyloid deposits. The ultimate aim is to get better at detecting Alzheimer’s early, as future therapies may be effective in treating the disease.###

Doctors can use [18F] Flutemetamol PET scans to spot the presence of amyloid in brain tissue, which helps to make a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. Going further, however, researchers from AMYPAD wanted to know if a visual read can tell the evaluator more about where the amyloid is, and how much of it there is. The answer, according to the authors, is yes.

The research is published in the European Journal of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging. The next step will be to validate the results using data from the two ongoing AMYPAD clinical studies and also investigate the possible clinical value of the findings.

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Being able to visualise the pathology linked to the disease is a big benefit for diagnosis and patient management. This is what physicians are telling researchers from IMI’s AMYPAD project, which is working to get definitive data on the role of amyloid PET (positron emission tomography) scans in Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis.###

The ability to show patients the presence of amyloid plaque in the brain allows physicians to have ‘more meaningful’ conversations with their patients. Alzheimer’s disease is currently diagnosed based on cognitive symptoms, a clinical examination and a combination of brain scans such as CT or MRI which show structural abnormalities. Amyloid PET scans are a newer technology and researchers from the AMYPAD project are trying to understand in which circumstances these PET scans are best deployed. They also want to find out at what stage in the disease they are most beneficial, and how an early PET scan might lead to a change in patient management.

An ongoing clinical trial is examining how the PET scan influences the diagnosis of patients with cognitive complaints. ‘The hypothesis we are testing in the clinical study is that an early scan leads to a higher confidence in the diagnosis of the patient,' explains AMYPAD co-leader Gill Farrar of GE Healthcare. ‘Physicians involved in the trials are also finding that it is useful to use the images to show the patient the presence or absence of pathology in the brain.’

Read more

• IMI’s news story
• AMYPAD project factsheet
• Project website