Promising Diagnostic Tool for Alzheimer's Disease Identified

Researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine have identified in live human brains new radioactive “tracer” molecules that bind to and “light up” tau tangles, a protein associated with a number of neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer's disease and other related dementias. Two studies were published in the Journal of Nuclear Medicine describing testing of three candidate molecules in patients with Alzheimer's disease, as well as the use of one molecule to measure the accumulation of tau proteins.