Posted at: 08/19/2009 7:02 PM
By: Axel Gumbel

Print Story  Email to a Friend

Dementia Tests: Medical Edge

(ABC 6 NEWS) -- It's not easy to watch a loved one suffer from dementia.

It's also not easy for doctors to always know exactly what kind of dementia a person may have, because there hasn't been a test.

Researchers at Mayo Clinic are making a lot of progress in this field.

They've developed a way to look at the living brain and more accurately tell what type of dementia a person has.

And this may help get patients on the right treatment.

At a distance these scans look like typical pictures of a brain taken during an MRI.

But at closer look they reveal information researchers used to only get during an autopsy.

"We are mainly looking at the most common forms of dementia," says Mayo Clinic Dr. Prashanthi Vemuri.

Dr. Prashanthi Vemuri says those forms are Alzheimer’s disease, Dementia with Lewy Bodies and Front temporal Dementia.

She's developed computer software that, when used in conjunction with standard MRI, allows doctors to better differentiate between these three diseases.

Without the help of this technology the diseases can be tricky to tell apart.

That's a problem because, for example, medications used to treat Alzheimer’s disease may not help and may even be harmful if you actually have dementia with Lewy Bodies.

Dr. Vemuri's technology lights up the parts of the brain affected by these three most common forms of dementia.

You can see the differences between Alzheimer’s disease and Dementia with Lewy Bodies and Front temporal Dementia.

And while at this time medications only treat symptoms and not the underlying disease, Dr. Clifford jack suggests that will soon change.

And this new technology may be key to getting people on the right medications.

"It's quite reasonable to suspect that fairly soon there are going to be treatments that either slow or arrest the underlying disease process that's causing clinical symptoms," says Mayo Dr. Clifford Jack.

And when these medications become available, Dr. Jack says doctors can use this technology to help them figure out which disease to treat so they can better care for their patients.