PICASO partner, UTV, who has run the trial in Italy, has successfully submitted an article for publication in the European Journal of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging. The article, ‘Brain metabolic patterns in patients with Suspected non-Alzheimer’s pathophysiology (SNAP) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD): is [18F] FDG a specific biomarker in these patients?’, is based on a study where medical data was shared using PICASO.
The article can be downloaded here.
Abstract
Aim: The present study was aimed to compare the pattern of the brain [18F] FDG uptake in Suspected non-Alzheimer’s pathophysiology (SNAP), AD and healthy controls by using 2-Deoxy-2-[18F]fluoroglucose ([18F] FDG) Positron Emission Tomography imaging. Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) biomarkers amyloid-β1–42 peptide (Aβ1–42) and Tau were used in order to differentiate AD from SNAP.
Materials and methods: the study included 43 newly-diagnosed AD patients (female=23; male=20) according to the NINCDS-ADRDA criteria and 15 SNAP patients (female=12; male =3) and a group of 34 healthy subjects that served as the control group (CG) found to be normal at neurological evaluation (males=20; females=14). A neuropsychological battery was administrated in AD and SNAP subjects; cerebrospinal fluid assay was conducted in both AD and SNAP as well. Brain PET/CT acquisition was started 30 ± 5 min after [18F] FDG injection in all the subjects. Statistical parametric mapping 12 (SPM12) implemented in Matlab 2018a was used for the analysis of PET scans in this study.
Results: As compared to SNAP, AD subjects showed a significant hypometabolism in a wide cortical area that involves the right frontal, parietal and temporal lobes. As compared to CG, AD subjects showed a significant reduction of [18F] FDG uptake in the parietal, limbic and frontal cortex while a more limited reduction of [18F] FDG uptake in the same areas was obtained when comparing SNAP to CG.
Conclusions: SNAP subjects show a milder impairment of brain [18F] FDG uptake as compared to AD. The partial overlap of the metabolic pattern between SNAP and AD limits the use of [18F] FDG PET/CT in effectively discriminating these clinical entities.
Download the article.