The value of SPET imaging in dementia

Is There a Typical Pattern of Brain SPECT Imaging in Alzheimer’s Disease?

“…At the same time, the medical community accepted that AD initially affects mainly the posterior regions and then with time shifts -visible with SPECT imaging -to affect the anterior association regions. For example, in some recent studies it was still noticed that in AD 'a wide variety of patterns was found' [7] or that 'there are no individual patterns which can be considered "typical"' [34]. Our results contradict these data.…”

A clinical role for 99mTc-HMPAO SPECT in the investigation of dementia?

“…However, if likelihood ratios are recalculated for pairwise disease group comparisons, then their values are independent of disease prevalence and results are therefore applicable to other patient populations. In clinical practice, the diagnostic task is often to choose between just two possible diseases13 and therefore likelihood ratios can provide a useful indication of the diagnostic gain of a test result and be applied to tests with multiple results and to multiple disease group comparisons.…”

The Use of SPECT in a Multidisciplinary Memory Clinic

“…there is no functional topography as measured with SPECT that is specific for any disease [3]. Nevertheless, SPECT might be a useful tool for research purposesespecially ncuroreceptor imaging - [3,5], maybe in moni toring the progression of disease and the response to treat ment. to constitute homogeneous groups of patients [10,45] and to correlate SPECT with clinical patterns [46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53], However, findings should always be interpreted in the light of cognitive, neurological, behavioral and structural imaging findings.…”

“…In small studies, there has been no overlap between patients and controls, but this may be an artefact of sample size. Patients with AD show decrease in brain glucose utilization and blood flow as well as diminished tracer uptake predominately in tem poroparietal cortex [for review, see 1,4,5]. However, this pattern is not specific [6,7], several patterns have been identified with positron emission tomography [8] as well as with SPECT [3,9,10] in AD, and according to Waldemar [3], the specificity of temporoparietal deficits is prob ably not better than that o f 'any abnormal' pattern in dis tinguishing AD from normal aging.…”