Alzheimer’s Disease Biomarker Advances: Imaging
The mid-2000s marked a period of significant advances in the development of biomarkers for Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Prior to this, research with living patients was limited to cognitive assessment and observation, and misclassification of AD contributed to inconsistent findings. Researchers and clinicians needed an accurate method to confirm diagnoses, explore their relationship with genetic risk factors, detect pathology in genetically high-risk individuals before clinical signs appeared, and act as intermediate phenotypes. One critical breakthrough was the development of the Pittsburgh-B (PiB) compound for positron emission tomography (PET) imaging in 2004. PiB-PET imaging allowed scientists to visualize amyloid-beta plaques in the brains of living patients, offering an unprecedented view of pathology that previously could only be seen post-mortem.
REFERENCES
- A landmark study published in the Annals of Neurology introduced the use of PiB-Pet imaging that enabled the visualization of amyloid-beta plaques—a hallmark of AlD—in living patients.
Klunk WE, Engler H, Nordberg A, et al. Imaging brain amyloid in Alzheimer’s disease with Pittsburgh Compound-B. Ann Neurol. 2004;55(3):306-319. https://doi.org/10.1002/ana.20009
- A comprehensive meta-analysis published in the Journal of the American Medical Association confirmed the relationship between APOE ɛ4 and cerebral amyloid pathology using PET imaging and described a 20- to 30-year interval between the first sign of amyloid and disease onset.
Jansen WJ, Ossenkoppele R, Knol DL, et al. Prevalence of cerebral amyloid pathology in persons without dementia: a meta-analysis. JAMA. 2015;313(19):1924–1938. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2015.4668