One more step in the early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease

2002/02/01 Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Osasuna

Currently, Alzheimer's disease has no effective treatment, usually serious for medical diagnosis. The patient may not receive symptoms during the first fifteen years.

Therefore, the key to research is finding a method to diagnose the disease in the first steps. Journal of Geriatric Psichiatry has released a project carried out with this objective. Jorge R. Doctors at Barrio University and Gary Small UCLA have prepared a chemical compound that can be a marker in the emission tomography of cerebral positron. This substance, called FDDNP, is stored in areas of the brain damaged by the disease. In this way, these areas can be detected by tomography, even if they are small and do not produce symptoms.

In case of early detection, the patient can perform a treatment that slows down degeneration. It is possible that in the future this method of early diagnosis is part of the usual medical recognitions. For the moment, the next objective of the researchers Barrio and Small will be to adapt this methodology to the follow-up of the therapeutic drugs.