Diagnosing Alzheimer's Disease

What day is it today? Where are the car keys? What was thingy’s name again? We all experience situations in everyday life when we forget something or can’t remember the right word. But when a loss for words, memory lapses or changes in behavior become a serious problem over the years, there may be a pathological memory disturbance – a form of dementia – behind it.

(Source: H. Barthel, O. Sabri, University Clinic Leipzig, 2009)

Although there is currently no cure for the disease, early treatment of the symptoms, combined with the right care and support, could improve the quality of life of people living with Alzheimer's disease. For sufferers, therefore, advanced imaging techniques and the related prospect of early diagnosis could lead to significant improvements.

Although present-day treatments can only alleviate the symptoms, and not the underlying causes, there is growing evidence to suggest that Alzheimer's patients benefit most when treatment begins at an early stage of the disease. Researchers and physicians expect even more progress from the effective use of drugs, and promising candidates are already being clinically investigated. Novel early-detection techniques might give a boost to the development of corresponding anti-Alzheimer's drugs.

Even in the early stages of the disease, beta-amyloid already accumulates in the brain and forms what are known as amyloid plaques. However, detection of these protein deposits, and thus a definite diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease, is currently not possible until only after the patient's death.

Today, diagnostic evaluation in vivo involves a time-consuming array of clinical tests, neuropsychological assessment and conventional imaging; it can be especially difficult in patients in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, in cases of mixed disease (co-morbidity), and in patients with a high IQ.

Post mortem studies also demonstrate that the clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease is incorrect in 10 to 30 percent of cases. Thus, there is a significant unmet medical need for better and earlier ways of differentiating between Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia.

Among other things, Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals is working on the development of novel tracers for positron emission tomography (PET) to support the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease. One of the PET tracers undergoing clinical development binds specifically to amyloid plaque in the brain – the pathological hallmark of Alzheimer's disease. The successful development of new substances in this field would represent an important step toward an earlier and more accurate diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease.

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