Tau PET Tracer Called Accurate for Alzheimer's Diagnosis

A study has found that positron emission tomography (PET) quantification of tau protein aggregates in the brain with an 18F-labeled tracer called flortaucipir discriminated Alzheimer's disease from other neurodegenerative diseases with strong, yet imperfect, accuracy, reports MedPage Today . Researchers examined 719 individuals across three dementia centers in South Korea, Sweden, and the United States from June 2014 to November 2017. In the primary analysis, the researchers assessed the discriminative accuracy of 18F flortaucipir for Alzheimer's dementia versus all non-Alzheimer's neurodegenerative disorders. In secondary analyses, they compared 18F flortaucipir SUVR with three established MRI measures. In the medial-basal and lateral temporal cortex, 18F flortaucipir uptake showed 89.9 percent sensitivity and 90.6 percent specificity (SUVR 1.34) for distinguishing Alzheimer's dementia from all non-Alzheimer's neurodegenerative disorders. The study was recently published in JAMA .