A Food and Drug Administration advisory committee has recommended that the agency approve a scan that can detect plaques — in the brain of a live person — that are markers for Alzheimer’s disease, The New York Times reported Friday.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/21/health/21alzheimers.html?src=me&ref=general
The FDA typically heeds the advice of its advisory committees, which means that it’s likely that Avid Radiopharmacueticals will win approval to market the scans. According to The Times, certain plaques are considered a medical criteria for having Alzheimer’s disease. A person who loses his or her memory is not diagnosed with Alzheimers’s unless they have the plaques.
Previously, the only way to confirm that there were plaques in a person’s brain was through an autopsy. But the new scan will permit doctors to detect the plaques in the living.
Avid, a unit of Eli Lilly & Co., has a dye tht makes plaque visible during PET scans.
Even though the is no cure for Alzheimer’s, the new scan is considered an important tool to correctly diagnosing, and manage, a patient’s illness. Doctors would learn for certain if a patient’s memory failure and other cognitive problens were being caused by Alzheimer’s or another type of disease, or from a stroke.
