Brain Scan Can Aid Early Detection of Alzheimer’s Disease
One of the most vexing things about diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease is that many patients don’t know they have this common form of dementia until it’s more advanced and challenging to treat. Now, a new study suggests that it may be possible to catch Alzheimer’s early with a single brain scan.Even though Alzheimer’s disease can’t be cured, early detection can help patients get treatment to help manage and sometimes slow the progression of symptoms, researchers noted in a paper published June 20 in Communications Medicine. Many techniques currently used to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease — including cognitive assessments, memory tests, and brain scans to look for telltale protein deposits in the brain and tissue shrinkage in the hippocampus region of the brain — can take weeks to schedule and then get the…