A PET scan (positron emission tomography) that measures uptake of sugar in the brain significantly improves the accuracy of diagnosing a type of dementia often mistaken for Alzheimer's disease, a study led by a University of Utah dementia expert has found. The scan, FDG-PET, helped six doctors from three national Alzheimer's disease centers correctly diagnose frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and Alzheimer's in almost 90 percent of cases in the study -- an improvement of as much as 14 percent from usual clinical diagnostic methods. FDG stands for fluorodeoxyglucose, a short-lived radioactive form of sugar injected into people during PET scans to show activity levels in different parts of the brain. In Alzheimer's, low activity is mostly in the back part of the brain; in FTD, low activity is mostly in the front of the brain.
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