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Overview of Dopamine Transporter Imaging in Parkinson’s Disease, Dementia with Lewy Bodies and Other Dementias

  • Neurology of Aging (KS Marder, Section Editor)
  • Published:
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Abstract

123I FP-CIT is a radiotracer that is used in conjunction with single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) scanning to detect dopaminergic neuron pre-synaptic terminal degeneration, in the striatum (caudate nucleus and putamen) of patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) and dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), showing a reduced uptake of this ligand by the dopamine transporters (DaT). This is a licensed diagnostic test in Europe (as DaTSCAN) and in the USA (as DaTscan). Recent work on functional imaging in PD and DLB largely uses the FP-CIT SPECT approach, and this is the focus of our paper, whilst noting that other ligands (e.g. beta-CIT) and imaging techniques such as positron emission tomography (PET) have been used in similar settings.

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Conflict of Interest

Naveed Malek declares that he has no conflict of interest.

Donald G. Grosset has received research support from Merz Pharmaceuticals; consultancy fees from AbbVie and Civitas; and honoraria from AbbVie, GE Healthcare, and UCB.

Human and Animal Rights and Informed Consent

This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

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  1. Institute of Neurological Sciences, Southern General Hospital, Glasgow, UK

    Naveed Malek & Donald G. Grosset

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  1. Naveed Malek
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Correspondence to Naveed Malek.

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This article is part of the Topical Collection on Neurology of Aging

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Malek, N., Grosset, D.G. Overview of Dopamine Transporter Imaging in Parkinson’s Disease, Dementia with Lewy Bodies and Other Dementias. Curr Geri Rep 4, 124–130 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13670-015-0126-9

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