Hwamee Oh, an associate professor of psychiatry and human behavior and of cognitive and psychological sciences at Brown University, is researching different positron emission tomography (PET) imaging methods of detecting Alzheimer’s disease as part of the HEAD study, a long-term project involving nine sites in the United States, Canada and Spain. In a new study published in the Lancet, HEAD researchers compared the effectiveness of two chemical detectors, called tau tracers, that detect tau in the brain. They found that an experimental tau tracer outperformed a clinically approved tau tracer — a discovery, Oh said, that could pave the way for earlier detection of Alzheimer’s disease.
