Diagnosing Alzheimer's could almost immediately become easier, thanks to a new radioactive compound.

An experiment of the new radiotracer that is known as 18F-AV-45 was able to safely distinguish the brains of Alzheimer's disease patients from healthy volunteers on the brain scans.

The results, which have been reported by a Johns Hopkins squad in the June Journal of Nuclear Medicine, could lead to improved ways to differentiate Alzheimer's from other kinds of dementia, trace disease succession and develop new therapeutics to wrestle the memory-ravaging disease.

Formerly, the only method to gaze into the brains of Alzheimer's patients was with the help of autopsy or the usage of another radioactive composite that is used in scans, or radiotracer, named as Pittsburgh compound or PIB.

However, PIB has a half-life of a mere 20 minutes, which means that half of the substance degenerates every 20 minutes after it is prepared. Accordingly, PIB's use is likely only at a small number of hospitals or academic medical centers with amenities to produce it because this compound deteriorates extremely fast.

The composite might as well be useful in future studies crafted to help solving existing medical mysteries, for example which particular patients are most probable to progress from mild cognitive impairment to full-blown Alzheimer's disease.