US experts could accurately identify Alzheimer’s disease and another type of dementia from structural brain patterns on medical scans, Neurology reports.
Currently, doctors can struggle to diagnose dementia, meaning the most appropriate treatment may be delayed. More invasive tests can help, but are unpleasant for the patient. Despite being two distinct diseases, Alzheimer’s and frontotemporal dementia, share similar clinical features and symptoms and can be hard to tell apart without medical tests.
Both cause the person to be confused and forgetful and can affect their personality, emotions and behaviour.
Alzheimer’s tends to attack the cerebral cortex – the layer of grey matter covering the brain – where as frontotemporal dementia, as the name suggests, tends to affect the temporal and frontal lobes of the brain, which can show up on brain scans, but these are not always diagnostic.