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.
What a New Mammography Study Reveals About BMI, Race, Ethnicity and Advanced Breast Cancer Risk
December 8th 2023In a new study examining population attributable risk proportions (PARPs) based on data from over three million screening mammography exams, researchers found that postmenopausal Black women had the highest BMI-related PARP and premenopausal Asian and Pacific Islander women had the highest breast density-related PARP for advanced breast cancer.
Study: Contrast-Enhanced Mammography Changes Surgical Plan in 22.5 Percent of Breast Cancer Cases
December 7th 2023Contrast-enhanced mammography detected additional lesions in 43 percent of patients and led to additional biopsies in 18.2 percent of patients, over half of whom had malignant lesions, according to a study of over 500 women presented at the recent Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) conference.
