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Commentary on “Diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease: Two decades of progress.” Diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease: Walking a well‐paved path
Author(s) -
Klunk William E.
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
alzheimer's and dementia
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 6.713
H-Index - 118
eISSN - 1552-5279
pISSN - 1552-5260
DOI - 10.1016/j.jalz.2005.10.002
Subject(s) - citation , gerontology , disease , library science , medicine , psychology , psychiatry , computer science , pathology
d i d A F The article, “Diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease: two deades of progress” by Dr. Khachaturian is a lucent and nformative account of the early struggles faced by the ational Institute on Aging (NIA) and a small, dedicated ore of extramural investigators to gain a critical mass and sufficient head of steam to define and attack a disease that, t the time, was amorphous and poorly represented in many asic and clinical research venues. The report goes on to eview promising current research advances and suggests rospects for future study. For those of us more recent to the eld and who can claim no credit for the successes in those arly struggles, this account is very enlightening with regard o how the paths that we traverse—with relative ease—in ur current research endeavors were paved for us. The esearch infrastructure developed by the committed scienists and administrators who began this work in the early 980s provided a fertile field in which the key basic and linical advances of the past 20 years could grow. The emarkable pace of this growth is without a doubt in large art owing to the foresight of the early program builders uch as Dr. Khachaturian and colleagues. The work of our neuroimaging group in Pittsburgh is just ne of many examples of this and can be traced directly ack to the very sort of networking encouraged by Khachaurian and colleagues described in this report. The recent dvances in neuroimaging the plaque pathology of Alzheier’s disease with the positron emission tomography (PET) racer known as Pittsburgh Compound-B (PIB) had its roots n a postdoctoral project (funded by NIA) that was highly nfluenced by the programmatic work of Dr. Khachaturian nd colleagues. Encouraged by Khachaturian, our group in ittsburgh began collaboration with the late George Glenner o develop compounds that would inhibit the aggregation of he recently discovered -amyloid (A ) peptide. It was in