David Soleimani-Meigooni led an international collaboration to evaluate the utility of amyloid and tau visual reads for diagnosing dementia.
David collaborated with Lund University to gather subjects with clinical diagnoses of dementia-AD (n=102), MCI-AD (n=41), non-AD diseases(n=76), and controls (n=20). The clinical diagnoses were independent of biomarkers, but the analysis considered fluid biomarkers (CSF Aβ42/40, and or plasma p-tau217). All subjects underwent tau PET (Flortaucipir) and amyloid PET (PIB or Flutemetamol). Two neurologists and 1 nuclear medicine physician rated the accumulation of cortical amyloid (positive/negative), and tau uptake (negative, MTL only - MTL, or MTL+cortex - CTX).
The main goal was to compare the sensitivity and specificity of visual reads to differentiate subjects with fluid biomarker-confirmed MCI/dementia-AD, against fluid biomarker-negative patients/controls. He found that amyloid (sen=96%, spec=84%) and tau (MTL sen=97%, spec=75%, CTX sen=92%, spec=88%) PET visual reads have similar sensitivity/specificity for detecting AD in cognitively impaired patients. However, visual tau-PET in the cortex compared with MTL only had increased specificity (p=0.0002) but lower sensitivity (p=0.03).
Important work to leverage the added value of visual reads and the regional information of tau PET in addition to fluid biomarkers for diagnosing AD!
