Alzheimer’s patients often had low cerebral amyloid

One in four patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease dementia had only scant evidence of neuritic amyloid plaques, and the finding was almost three times more common among apolipoprotein E epsilon-4 noncarriers than in carriers, researchers reported online in JAMA Neurology.

“These findings suggest that a nonamyloidogenic variant resembling the clinical phenotype of Alzheimer disease may be more common than previously expected … particularly in APOE4 [apolipoprotein E epsilon-4] noncarriers,” said Sarah Monsell of the University of Washington’s National Alzheimer’s Coordinating Center, Seattle, and her associates. Such patients might not respond to treatments targeting fibrillar or soluble amyloid-beta, the researchers said. Read more.