Healthcare Unit

Sections : Alzheimer, Autopsy

Since many years autopsy was considered as the best way to confirm the presence of Alzheimer’s disease. National Institute on Aging and the Alzheimer’s Association has proposed new guidelines. These guidelines seek to distinguish between memory changes that are diagnosed by doctors when a person is alive and the changes seen by pathologists in an autopsy. There will also be additional information in the guidelines that will help scientists in developing tests that will help in studying changes in brain, blood or spinal fluid and will thus help in an early diagnosis of the disease. Several renowned companies are working on compounds changes in brain on positron emission tomography scan.

These changes help in detecting Alzheimer’s. Such companies are Eli Lilly and Co, Bayer and General Electric Co. Many other companies and research team are working on other types of biomarkers. Dr. Creighton Phelps, who is at the National Institute on Aging’s division of neuroscience, said that the biomarkers might someday replace pathology. Nowadays pathologists look for clumps in the brain; these clumps are of a protein called beta amyloid and a protein called tau. These clumps help the pathologists in diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease. But studies have also shown that in many cases people died with tangles in their brains but still there was no abnormality in cognitive functioning. The proposed guidelines say that patients who suffer from memory problems due to the disease will be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s dementia. And in milder cases it will be mild cognitive impairment (MCI) due to Alzheimer’s dementia.

Dr. Phelps says that earlier all these diseases where categorized into one big pool. But these cases were not equivalent. Dr. Phelps said that dementia can be caused by many diseases such as vascular diseases. So being sure about what is the root cause of the problem is very important. The guidelines offer a great deal of information on how people’s brain is to be tested in autopsy. The test that are to be done have been specified and the pathologists are summoned to quantify the amount of plaque that they find in the patient’s brain. Bill Thies of the Alzheimer’s Association said that knowing the position of plaques in a brain will help in finding the answer to the question that why some people have dementia and some don’t have. NIA, which is a part of the National Institutes of Health, and the Alzheimer’s Association earlier this year, issued new criterions for the diagnosis which will help doctors in better classification of patients who are tested for symptoms of dementia.