There are a lot of challenges now in diagnosing Alzheimer’s and related disorders, but fortunately we also have a lot of tools. So cerebrospinal fluid and/or PET scans are really the gold standard for diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease. FDG PET actually has value in diagnosing other neurodegenerative dementias as well. It’s probabilistic. It’s not so specific, but it allows for a high confidence diagnosis in non-Alzheimer dementias like frontotemporal dementia or Lewy body dementia...
There are a lot of challenges now in diagnosing Alzheimer’s and related disorders, but fortunately we also have a lot of tools. So cerebrospinal fluid and/or PET scans are really the gold standard for diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease. FDG PET actually has value in diagnosing other neurodegenerative dementias as well. It’s probabilistic. It’s not so specific, but it allows for a high confidence diagnosis in non-Alzheimer dementias like frontotemporal dementia or Lewy body dementia. But the specialty biomarkers that are really getting a lot of attention these days are blood-based biomarkers, and they’re really looking incredibly good, and we’re just rolling them out into our subspecialty practices. Right now, most of us want to interpret them in the context of a gold standard PET scan or spinal fluid result. But they’re performing very well and I think hopefully we’ll get reimbursement pretty soon so that patients don’t have to pay out of pocket for them, which can be quite costly at the moment. But they’re going to revolutionize our approach to the diagnostic evaluation. And while we don’t have them in the clinical practice guidelines yet, probably in the next year or so we will revise the clinical practice guidelines to include those as more subspecialists gain experience with them.
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