This fact can lead to reduced specificity, as many neurological diseases or disease

stages can be characterized by similar changes in the concentrations of the metabolites that can be measured accurately. Secondly, MRS measurements performed in vivo can never become more repeatable than measurements performed in phantoms; for most metabolites, measurement repeatability in vitro is limited to 2% to 3%. Consequently, assuming that this limit is reached in vivo, changes on the order of -5% in metabolite concentrations will be needed on an individual patient basis, in order for this change to be attributed to changes due to disease or treatment. Unfortunately, Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical natural variability of baseline states of different persons is within this range, preventing diagnosis of the disease using this approach. Moreover, such small changes from the baseline state Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical of one person might require more than few weeks of drug treatment, if trying to decide whether a treatment works or not. On the upside, however, MRS measurements are short, noninvasive, and can easily yield quantitative results with commercially available data analysis programs.63 Such MRS-based approaches for monitoring disease response to treatment

Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical can prove invaluable for phase II clinical trials, by allowing a significant reduction of the number of enrôlées.51,64 Positron emission tomography Positron emission tomography (PET) using 18fluorodeoxyglucose (18FDG) is used to study cortical metabolism. In AD patients, 18FDG-PET shows Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical a typical

pattern of reduced cortical uptake in the region of the temporal and parietal association cortex, particularly in the region of the posterior cingulum; in mild-to-moderate stages of AD, prefrontal association areas are affected as well.65 MCI subjects already show – to a lesser extent – a similar distribution of metabolic deficits which can predict conversion from MCI to AD with an accuracy of over Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical 80%. 66,67 Many researchers regard 18FDG-PET as the gold standard in the in vivo diagnosis of early stages of AD, although this method is not widely available and is relatively expensive. The benefit of 18FDG-PET for differential diagnosis in AD patients is less well validated. Established automated analysis BMS-345541 cost algorithms are alreadyavailable for PET investigations, providing clinicians with z-score maps for metabolic Metalloexopeptidase deviation (for example see ref 68). PET has not yet been used in multicenter treatment trials; however, several monocenter studies have been conducted with PET demonstrating the effect of cholinergic treatment, in particular, on the metabolic pattern in AD patients. A problematic aspect of the majority of the studies is that the analyses are usually based on unblinded treatment arms and that treated responders (according to clinical criteria) were compared with untreated and treated nonresponders.