http://harvardscience.harvard.edu/stories/person/1148 Stories and external links referencing a person (RSS) en http://harvardscience.harvard.edu/medicine-health/articles/compound-traces-brain-plaques-real-time <!--paging_filter--><p>Alzheimer's disease is notoriously difficult to diagnose. Though sophisticated functional and cognitive tests can help, they often fail to distinguish between Alzheimer's and other non-amyloid-based dementias, particularly frontotemporal dementia. The ability to measure plaques in vivo would not only provide clinicians with an immediate and reliable diagnosis, but over time would allow them to gauge how the disease is progressing. Positron emission tomography (PET) may be a window into the brain for neurologists. Harvard researchers have described how a compound, called Pittsburgh compound B (PIB), can be tracked by PET, a technique that may soon be used to diagnose and monitor Alzheimer's disease in humans. The technique is described in the Sept. 29, 2003 online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Assistant Professor of Neurology Brian Bacskai and the John B. Penney Jr. Professor of Neurology Bradley Hyman, both at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital.</p> Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:32:00 -0400 70652986 3419 at http://harvardscience.harvard.edu http://harvardscience.harvard.edu/medicine-health/articles/majority-alzheimers-plaques-cleared-brains-living-mice <!--paging_filter--><p>Harvard Medical School researchers, working with scientists at Elan Pharmaceuticals, cleared 70 percent of Alzheimer's plaques from the brains of mice by applying anti-plaque antibodies directly to the mouse brains through tiny holes in their skulls. A year and a half before, Elan scientists showed that they could prevent plaque formation in the Alzheimer's-prone mice by vaccinating them with a protein found in the plaques, amyloid-beta. But this was the first time that anyone was able to clear pre-existing plaques from the brains of living animals. "No one has ever demonstrated directly the clearance of amyloid-beta deposits," said Brian Bacskai, Harvard Medical School instructor in neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital and lead author of the study.</p> <p><a href="http://harvardscience.harvard.edu/medicine-health/articles/majority-alzheimers-plaques-cleared-brains-living-mice">read more</a></p> Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:10:44 -0400 70652986 2915 at http://harvardscience.harvard.edu