Case Reports: PET Imaging in Dementia

In two cases of progressing dementia, PET imaging with amyloid and tau tracers helped to clarify the diagnosis by ruling out Alzheimer's disease, researchers suggested.

Case 1 was a 71-year-old former NFL player who had experienced numerous concussions during his career and was developing what appeared clinically to be Alzheimer's disease. However, PET scanning with the [¹⁸F]-florbetapir tracer showed no evidence of cerebral amyloid plaques, which excluded Alzheimer's, according to Samuel Gandy, MD, of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, and colleagues.

Case 2 was a 59-year-old physician who had suffered a head injury skiing, but who also had shown personality, mood, and cognitive changes in the months before the injury. Amyloid imaging with [¹⁸F]-florbetapir PET was negative except for at the site of the head injury, and the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) was therefore ruled out, the researchers reported online in Translational Psychiatry. Read more.