Authors: Kai Kendziorra Henrike Wolf Philipp Mael Meyer Henryk Barthel Swen Hesse Georg Alexander Becker Julia Luthardt Andreas Schildan Marianne Patt Dietlind Sorger Anita Seese HermanJosef Gertz Osama Sabri
Publish Date: 2010/11/11
Volume: 38, Issue: 3, Pages: 515-525
Abstract
Postmortem studies indicate a loss of nicotinic acetylcholine receptor nAChRs in Alzheimer’s disease AD In order to establish whether these changes in the cholinergic system occur at an early stage of AD we carried out positron emission tomography PET with a specific radioligand for the α4β2 nicotinic acetylcholine receptor α4β2 nAChR in patients with mild to moderate AD and in patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment MCI who have a high risk to progress to ADNine patients with moderate AD eight patients with MCI and seven agematched healthy controls underwent 218Ffluoro32Sazetidinylmethoxypyridine 218FFA85380 PET After coregistration with individual magnetic resonance imaging the binding potential BPND of 218FFA85380 was calculated using either the corpus callosum or the cerebellum as reference regions PET data were analysed by region of interest analysis and by voxelbased analysisBoth patients with AD and MCI showed a significant reduction in 218FFA85380 BPND in typical ADaffected brain regions Thereby the corpus callosum was identified as the most suitable reference region The 218FFA85380 BPND correlated with the severity of cognitive impairment Only MCI patients that converted to AD in the later course n = 5 had a reduction in 218FFA85380 BPND218FFA85380 PET appears to be a sensitive and feasible tool for the detection of a reduction in α4β2 nAChRs which seems to be an early event in AD In addition 218FFA85380 PET might give prognostic information about a conversion from MCI to AD
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