HONOLULU – MRI is an “indispensable” tool for the diagnosis and treatment staging of Alzheimer’s disease, according to a talk delivered May 11 at the ISMRM meeting in Honolulu.
Why? In part because the diagnosis of the disease is shifting to a biomarker-based, biological framework, presenter Yuhei Takado, MD, PhD, of the National Institutes for Quantum Science and Techonology in Chiba, Japan, told session attendees.
“MRI remains indispensable for subtyping, prognosis, and treatment monitoring,” he said. “Precision medicine in Alzheimer’s disease will require detailed MRI phenotyping beyond amyloid status.”
There are two neuropathological hallmarks of AD, Takado noted: amyloid beta plaques and tau proteins. The appearance of amyloid beta is the earliest biological change in the brain of an individual with Alzheimer’s, while the baseline burden of tau proteins predicts longitudinal brain atrophy…