Perfusion SPECT: Its role in the diagnosis and differential diagnosis of alzheimer’s disease, with particular emphasis on guidelines

Abstract

Dementia is a clinical diagnosis refl ecting many possible underlying pathologies, including, for example, vascular dementia and neurodegenerative disorders such as frontotemporal dementia, Lewy body-type disorder or Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The breakthrough of 99m technetium-labelled perfusion tracers in the 1990s resulted in many SPECT studies of fl ow changes in AD. In the fi rst decade of 2000, the role of perfusion SPECT was shifted from diagnosis towards differential diagnosis, parallel to the growing attention for diagnosing early stages of dementia. This evolution is refl ected in the upcoming guidelines, which are detailed in this chapter.