Clinical Trial: Assessment of Hyperphosphorylated Tau PET Binding in Primary Progressive Aphasia

Study Status: Recruiting
Recruit Status: Recruiting
Study Type: Interventional

Official Title: Assessment of Hyperphosphorylated Tau PET Binding in Primary Progressive Aphasia

Brief Summary: This study is designed to learn more about overall tau burden in the brain of patients with Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA).

Detailed Summary: Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is an umbrella term that encompasses a group of neurodegenerative syndromes characterized by varying combinations of progressive speech and language problems. Three clinical variants of PPA have been described and are well recognized: the agrammatic variant characterized by grammatical errors in speech and writing and typically associated with phonetic errors in speech; the semantic variant characterized by poor naming from loss of knowledge about the meaning of words; and the logopenic variant characterized by word retrieval problems and poor sentence repetition from impairment of working memory and phonemic errors. Pathological studies of PPA patients that died with postmortem examination of their brains have demonstrated that PPA is associated with a number of different abnormal cellular proteins that do not have perfect associations with the three PPA variants. One such protein is the microtubule associated protein, tau, which is the most common abnormal protein found in the brains of patients with PPA. Tau is an important protein that has been linked to the neurodegenerative process in many diseases. No neuroimaging studies have investigated tau deposition in PPA and hence the binding characteristics of AV-1451 (the Tau binding drug used in this study) in PPA are unknown. Understanding the binding characteristics of AV-1451 is crucial to help determine whether it can serve as a biomarker for tau deposition in the brains of patients with PPA.
Sponsor: Mayo Clinic

Current Primary Outcome: The investigators will be looking at the amount of Tau protein in the brain of patients with PPA. [ Time Frame: 2 years ]

Original Primary Outcome: Same as current

Current Secondary Outcome:

Original Secondary Outcome:

Information By: Mayo Clinic

Dates:
Date Received: April 7, 2016
Date Started: July 2016
Date Completion: June 2018
Last Updated: March 7, 2017
Last Verified: March 2017