YET another method that lets doctors diagnose Alzheimer’s disease from brain scans has been developed in the US. At present, the only surefire way to find Alzheimer’s is to check a patient’s brain after death. But if doctors can pick up early signs of the disease in the living, they could offer them new treatments.
Last June, a team led by Jorge Barrio of the University of California at Los Angeles showed PET scans of an Alzheimer’s patient who had been injected with a radioactive fluorine-rich tracer. This highlighted plaques – localised areas of damaged brain tissue that don’t show…
