New PET Imaging Approach Depicts Widespread Damage of Early Alzheimer's

A study in Alzheimer's & Dementia found that synaptic positron-emission tomography (PET) imaging uncovered significant brain alterations in people in the early phases of Alzheimer's disease, reports Health Imaging . "Our new methods enable us to detect widespread synaptic losses throughout the brain," said Yale University School of Medicine Professor Adam Mecca. "This gives us confidence that we may use these results as a biomarker outcome for therapeutic trials, which could help speed development of new drugs to combat the disease." The new PET method assessed the synapses of 34 people with Alzheimer's and 19 without the disease by imaging the binding of synaptic vesicle glycoprotein 2A. Previous approaches have broadly visualized brain tissue losses or reduced metabolism. "These methods will allow us to examine synaptic loss at still earlier stages of disease — when people have evidence of Alzheimer's pathogenesis but have not yet manifested symptoms," said Yale Professor Christopher van Dyck.