Imaging amyloid: now that we can see it, what does it all mean?

Published on August 26, 2010 Reviewed on May 1, 2020   70 min

A selection of talks on Clinical Practice

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0:00
Hello, my name is William Klunk and I'm Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. I'm going to talk about imaging amyloid. Now that we can see it, what does it all mean?
0:14
We should remember that this is still a very new field, in fact the first presentation on the topic was given in July of 2002 by Henry Engler at the 8th International Conference on Alzheimer's disease in Stockholm, Sweden. It was the Swedish group that coined the term 'PiB' or Pittsburgh compound-B.
0:35
Although new, it's an area of rapid research growth, in what we euphemistically refer to as our 'pibliography' or collection of papers that refer to the use of pib in amyloid imaging, you can see an exponential growth over the past eight years, so that there are now well over 150 papers and growing. Of course I won't get to them all, but I'll try to sample the highlights to give an overview of the field.
1:02
By way of overview, what I'll be talking about is: can we really see amyloid? By that I mean: is there a good pathological correlation between what we see in vivo with a PET scan, and what is actually in the brain that we can later examine after death. Then I want to talk about what it all means, I'll break these into two general categories. The first being to confirm what post mortem studies have already told us. There's a wealth of valuable information from post mortem studies, but of course this in vivo imaging was developed to go beyond these limitations. What we're going to talk about then are things like longitudinal studies, and all kinds of things that couldn't be done with post mortem studies but can potentially be done with this new in vivo imaging technology.

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Imaging amyloid: now that we can see it, what does it all mean?

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