A European study has found new methods for detecting early signs of Alzheimer’s disease using brain and spinal fluid.
Results from a large European study, led by researchers at the Karolinska Institutet, Sweden, build on the need for reliable diagnostic methods to enable medics to prescribe treatment as early as possible to reduce or even prevent the disease.
Insoluble amyloid plaques accumulating in the brain is a typical sign of the development of the disease and these can be measured using positron emission tomography (PET camera). Amyloid levels can also be measured in spinal fluid.
In this study, which is published in Brain, 230 patients at seven European memory clinics participated in the study and a small group of healthy individuals were control subjects
Researchers compared the amyloid-PET measurements in the brain with amyloid42 in the spinal fluid to see how they align.
PET studies on the patients’ brains were evaluated at the local centres and centrally at the Karolinska Institutet, with researchers using the centiloid method to standardise the measured amyloid values on a unified scale for ease of comparison.
The researchers found that the best results came by comparing the amyloid level in the brain with the ratio between the levels of amyloid42 and amyloid40 in the spinal fluid.
They thought that the forms of beta-amyloid found in the brain and spinal fluid were not identical.
Agneta Nordberg, of the Department of Neurobiology, Care Sciences and Society, Centre for Alzheimer’s Research, Karolinska Institutet, said: “Interestingly, there was also a difference between the values measured in the brain and spinal fluid in a smaller group of patients.
“This may justify that, in some unclear cases, the diagnosis should include an amyloid PET scan to complement the cerebrospinal fluid sample.
"These findings are also important because it is increasingly common to perform amyloid-PET studies upon the inclusion of patients in new drug studies.”
Leuzy A, Chiotis K, Hasselbalch G et al. Pittsburgh Compound B imaging and cerebrospinal fluid amyloid-beta in a multicentre European Memory Clinic study. Brain 8 July,2106; doi: 10.1093/brain/aww160 [abstract]
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