The Foundation of Medical Professionals Alliance in Taiwan (FMPAT) yesterday urged the government to include tau positron emission tomography (tau PET) imaging in the clinical guidelines for diagnosing dementia.
Citing data from a 2023 National Health Research Institutes epidemiology report on dementia, the foundation said the prevalence of dementia among people aged 65 years and older was 7.99 percent, which aligns with a 2011 survey by the Taiwan Alzheimer’s Disease Association that estimated the prevalence to be 8.04 percent.
FMPAT executive director Lin Shih-chia (林世嘉) said there could be more than 470,000 people with dementia in Taiwan by 2031 and more than 880,000 by 2061.
Photo courtesy of the foundation
The diagnosis of dementia in Taiwan relies heavily on clinical symptoms, questionnaires and image subtraction, but the procedure often takes six months to one year, which could delay the “golden period” for dementia treatment, she said.
The foundation said that with the rapidly increasing elderly population, the diagnosis and treatment of dementia must be improved by introducing advanced techniques to enhance accuracy, so it invited doctors to share medical study findings about tau PET.
Tau PET is an imaging technique that uses a radioactive tracer to detect and measure abnormal accumulation of tau protein tangles in the brain.
Kaohsiung Chang Gung Memorial Hospital honorary deputy superintendent Chen Shun-sheng (陳順勝), a neurologist, cited a June study as saying that the positivity of tau PET scans could be a better biomarker for staging dementia pathology than a positive amyloid beta PET scan alone, adding that it could be used to more accurately predict the risk of developing dementia and help decide on the intervention needed.
A positive tau PET scan occurred at a non-negligible rate among cognitively unimpaired people, while the combination of amyloid beta PET positivity and tau PET positivity was associated with a high risk of clinical progression in preclinical and symptomatic stages of Alzheimer’s disease.
Meanwhile, Aprinoia Therapeutics founder and chairman Jang Ming-Kuei (張明奎) said a study by the company’s medical research team, which was published in the Alzheimer’s & Dementia journal in August, analyzed tau PET scan images of 1,277 participants with cognitive complaints and evaluated the diagnostic performance of disease-specific spatial patterns.
They found that disease-specific spatial patterns of 18F-florzolotau PET imaging demonstrated high diagnostic accuracy in differentiating tauopathies, with 96 percent for Alzheimer’s disease, 94.4 percent for frontotemporal lobe degeneration, 93.7 percent for progressive supranuclear palsy and 97.5 percent for corticobasal degeneration, he cited the study as saying.
Kaoshiung Chang Gung Memorial Hospital Division of Neurology deputy director Chang Chiung-chih (張瓊之) said clinical symptoms of different types of dementia and other medical conditions often overlap, making early and accurate diagnosis difficult.
Tau PET scans enable doctors to see the location and amount of tau protein tangles in the brain, which could help them distinguish between neurodegenerative disorders, she said.
As Taiwan is entering an era of precision medicine, it should also consider including tau PET imaging in the clinical guidelines for diagnosing dementia, so that doctors could more accurately diagnose the neurodegenerative disorders earlier, before they progress to an irreversible stage.
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