A new study in the Journal of Nuclear Medicine offers insight into how the condition affects the general population, as well as how radiologists can help in the cardiac amyloidosis diagnostic journey.

Biopharmaceutical firm Attralus has completed a $25 million Series A financing designed to further validate its AT-01 pan-amyloid radiotracer for PET/CT.

“We anticipate that these expert multisocietal consensus recommendations on multimodality imaging in cardiac amyloidosis will standardize the diagnosis and improve the management of this highly morbid and underdiagnosed disease," wrote authors of the new guidelines published in the Journal of Nuclear Cardiology.

Recent research found strain parameters taken from a cine MRI-based deformable registration algorithm (DRA) can determine the severity of amyloid buildup in the heart and may provide prognostic information on patients with light-chain (AL) amyloidosis.

While amyloid imaging is typically discussed with regard to diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease, a team of French researchers, presenting at the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging (SNMMI) 2015 annual meeting, have found that amyloid scans of the heart can predict major cardiac events.

PET with 11C-PIB provides a noninvasive method for visualizing amyloid deposits in the heart, according to a study published in the February issue of the Journal of Nuclear Medicine. The researchers suggest that 11C-PIB eventually may be used in the clinical setting as both a diagnostic tool and a treatment follow-up method.