An alternate approach to imaging brain function in Alzheimer’s Disease uses activation imaging, in which subjects perform a cognitive task, such as a memory test, in comparison to a control or resting state, during scanning. These methods identify brain regions that show increased cerebral blood flow (CBF), which is tightly coupled to neural activity, during ongoing mental operations. In principle, brain regions with impaired neural activity will show less CBF when engaged in a task than those unaffected and have the potential for identifying deficits more sensitively. In practice, however, activation imaging is more complicated: first, PET ligands used in activation imaging, typically H 2 [15-O], have a short half life, necessary for experiments involving multiple conditions but producing images with significantly lower signal, (more…)
Patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment, considered to be of considerable clinical interest because of the 50% rate of conversion f ...
Positron Emission Tomography (PET) has proven to be a sensitive and specific tool for identifying functional brain changes in patie ...
Identifying genetic polymorphisms that are overrepresented in Alzheimer’s Disease has proven a successful way of identifying indivi ...
The current standard of clinical care for mild to moderate Alzheimer’s Disease is treatment with cholinesterase inhibitors. Four ar ...
There is a keen interest in developing more direct measures of Alzheimer’s Disease-specific pathology, which has led to the emergen ...