title: The interest of amyloid PET imaging in the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  This review evaluates the potential clinical utility of amyloid imaging.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Amyloid PET is a valid in-vivo marker of neuritic plaque load and correlates with amyloid plaque surface area. Abundant diffuse plaques, however, with scant neuritic plaques can also give rise to a positive scan, most often reported in association with Lewy body disease. Specificity of amyloid PET for discriminating Alzheimer's disease from healthy controls is higher than that of structural MRI. Sensitivity for discriminating Alzheimer's disease from healthy controls or from frontotemporal lobar degeneration is also higher than that of fluorodeoxyglucose-PET, with higher interreader reliability. Within a same center there is high concordance between dichotomization of cases based on amyloid PET versus cerebrospinal fluid Aβ42. In a tentative algorithm, we restrict clinical-diagnostic use to dementia with age of onset before 60 years, primary progressive aphasia and corticobasal syndrome, cases with objective cognitive deficits that could be due to a neurodegenerative cause but also have significant cerebrovascular or psychiatric comorbidity, and rapidly progressive dementia.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Empirical studies that evaluate how amyloid PET can change clinical-diagnostic thinking are starting to emerge. Key questions to be resolved are its role compared with cerebrospinal fluid markers and its impact on patient outcome.
authors.affiliation: aLaboratory for Cognitive Neurology, Department of Neurosciences, University of Leuven bNeurology Department, University Hospitals Leuven cAlzheimer Research Centre KU Leuven, Leuven Institute for Neuroscience and Disease, University of Leuven, dNuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging, University Hospitals and University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
authors.forename: Rik
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Vandenberghe
authors.forename: Katarzyna
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Adamczuk
authors.forename: Koen
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Van Laere
mesh_terms: D000544:Alzheimer Disease / Q000134:cerebrospinal fluid / Q000175:diagnosis*; D000682:Amyloid / Q000378:metabolism*; D016229:Amyloid beta-Peptides / Q000134:cerebrospinal fluid; D001921:Brain / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*; D019788:Fluorodeoxyglucose F18; D006801:Humans; D010446:Peptide Fragments / Q000134:cerebrospinal fluid; D049268:Positron-Emission Tomography; D015203:Reproducibility of Results
chemical_list: D000682:Amyloid; D016229:Amyloid beta-Peptides; D010446:Peptide Fragments; C075222:amyloid beta-protein (1-42); D019788:Fluorodeoxyglucose F18