The Newest FDA Approval in the Alzheimer’s Fight

Alzheimer’s disease as well as dementia are two terrible diseases that not only hurt a patient, they hurt families. Dealing with either one of these very difficult diseases can take a major toll on everyone involved. The sad thing is that no amount of diagnostic imaging can really avoid either and help provide a good strong treatment program that will deal with either condition.

A CT scan, MRI scan, and any other test will reveal that it’s there and what the level it’s in. Now the FDA has made a move forward in order to work on the monitoring end of things. Vizamyl has been approved for the purpose of monitoring Alzheimer’s and dementia. The drug is basically a PET scan tracer that’s used to create color images for images normally seen in black and white.

The diagnosticimaging.com article stated that “Many Americans are evaluated every year to determine the cause of diminishing neurological functions, such as memory and judgment that raise the possibility of Alzheimer’s disease.” This kind of improvement helps because although it’s not a cure or a manner of prevention, it definitely aides in the battle for discovery.

Vizamyl will not tell you what stage Alzheimer’s is in, nor will it be used to predict whether or not it’s coming. The drug itself is for scanning purposes, but on the plus side a clear and more accurate scan is likely to help the patient in a greater way. The battle against Alzheimer’s and dementia is not likely to change for a long time. It will take much more research and far greater work to actually make progress.

To be able to see a colorful image and better interpret it is a step in the proper direction and hopefully it will mean that in the end better things will lie ahead. If you have any questions about diagnostic imaging procedures please feel free to give us a call. Our team of dedicated imaging professionals here at Clermont Radiology looks forward to answering all your questions and aiding you in your imaging needs. 

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What’s Good for the Liver

A lesion on the liver can mean any number of things. A complex condition in the liver can be a major problem. Treatment for any condition of the liver will succeed if the detection of the condition is early. Diagnostic imaging procedures such as the PET/CT scans are what are normally used in order to characterize lesions. It’s been recently speculated though that the PET/MRI might actually be better than the PET/CT. As stated in an article published by auntminnie.com “PET/MRI provided better diagnostic confidence due to soft-tissue contrast and complementary information from different MRI sequences.”

The study conducted in order to arrive at this conclusion is the first one conducted for this purpose. According to the study there is more accurate differentiation and the article explained that “MRI offers enhanced soft-tissue contrast and has proved particularly beneficial for patients with small liver lesions. The modality has shown superior results compared to CT and PET/CT for depicting and characterizing liver tumors.” While this is a first study it will be interesting to see if greater samples yield the same results.

All conditions affect people in different ways, when you think of how incredibly different people’s immune systems are. One patient can go through a liver lesion and issue easily while the other could succumb to greater effects almost immediately. The way the study was conducted there were 70 patients enrolled. Of the 70 patients 39 were men while 31 were women. The study was thorough and it employed experienced readers looking at the results of each sub modality and comparing findings.

There is still the fact that it was only 70 people with a median age of 56 with a plus/minus of 14 years. The problem with that is that the variance does not include or factor younger patients. There are too many factors that have yet to be considered to say that the results are a fact. It will be interesting to see if physicians start employing the PET/MRI more as a result of these findings or if more studies will be conducted in the future.

If you have any questions about diagnostic imaging procedures please feel free to give us a call. Our team of dedicated imaging experts here at Clermont Radiology looks forward to answering any questions you may have and helping you with all your imaging needs.