On Monday 5th February 2018 Peter Parbo, MD, Department of Nuclear Medicine & PET Centre, Aarhus University defended his PhD thesis on 

A PET study of the relationship between microglial activation, amyloid-β plaques and tau tangles in early Alzheimer’s disease

  

As more people become elderly the prevalence of dementia goes up. Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause for dementia affecting approximately 50,000 people in Denmark.

Previous studies have described varying levels of brain inflammation along with amyloid plaques and tau tangles in the cortex. Brain inflammation could represent a target for therapy, but we need to gain more knowledge about its spatial and temporal relationship to plaques and tangles. The aim of this thesis was to use imaging to examine the inter-relationships between these characteristic pathologies in Alzheimer patients. We investigated levels and distributions of amyloid plaques, neurofibrillary tau tangles and microglial activation, using 11C-PiB, 18F-flortaucipir and 11C-PK11195 positron emission tomography in prodromal and early clinical Alzheimer’s disease. The cohort is being followed and assessed again after a 2 year interval. Our baseline findings provide in vivo evidence that brain inflammation is an early event in Alzheimer’s disease. Hence, an intervention targeting microglial activation could play a neuroprotective role against Alzheimer’s disease.

Main supervisor were:

Professor David Brooks, Dept. of Nuclear Medicine & PET Centre, Aarhus University

Examiners were:

  • Professor Oskar Hansson,
    Clinical Memory Research Unit, Lund University, Sweden
  • Professor Ian Law
    Dept. of Clinical Physiology, Nuclear Medicine & PET, University of Copenhagen, Denmark