Amyloid imaging in prodromal Alzheimer's disease

Patients with mild cognitive impairment are at an increased risk of progression to Alzheimer's disease. However, not all patients with mild cognitive impairment progress, and it is difficult to accurately identify those patients who are in the prodromal stage of Alzheimer's disease. In a recent paper, Koivunen and colleagues report that Pittsburgh compound-B, an amyloid-beta positron emission tomography ligand, predicts the progression of patients with mild cognitive impairment to Alzheimer's disease. Of 29 subjects with mild cognitive impairment, 21 (72%) had a positive Pittsburgh compound-B positron emission tomography baseline scan. In their study, 15 of these 21 (71%) patients progressed to Alzheimer's disease, whilst only 1 out of 8 (12.5%) Pittsburgh compound-B-negative patients with mild cognitive impairment did so. Moreover, in these mild cognitive impairment patients, the overall amyloid burden increased approximately 2.5% during the follow-up period. This is consistent with other longitudinal amyloid imaging studies that found a similar increase in amyloid deposition over time in patients with mild cognitive impairment. These studies together challenge current theories that propose a flattening of the increase of brain amyloid deposition already in the preclinical stage of Alzheimer's disease. These findings may have important implications for the design of future clinical trials aimed at preventing progression to Alzheimer's disease by lowering the brain amyloid-beta burden in patients with mild cognitive impairment.