Essentia Health rolls out promising Alzheimer’s disease detection method

DULUTH, Minn.– After nearly one hundred years of research, a recent break through with Alzheimer’s disease has already seen success in the Northland.

The innovation involves an injectable radio pharmaceutical called “Amyvid.”

It is injected shortly before the patient has a routine PET or CT scan.

Before Duluth invested in this, patients near and far had to travel to the Twin Cities for this opportunity.

And with this new tech, it targets and detects amyloid plaques. A protein built up in patients’ brains.

One of the neurologists told FOX 21, that 1 in 9 people will be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s after the age of 65.

And before this opportunity, treatment for the disease was grim.

“Recently as about two years ago, we would just tell people we would come to a sort of relative diagnosis and say, you probably have Alzheimer’s disease. We can’t for sure say that until autopsy, and there’s nothing we can do about it anyway. You know, it just gets worse over time, and that’s where we left it,” said Stephen Rostad, MD Neurologist, Essentia Health.

The Essentia health clinic in Duluth began using the injection in July.

Since then, it’s already helped a dozen people.

And so far, things are looking promising.

“It changes things entirely to be able to say, okay, ‘we can tell you have this, but we can do something about it. We can try to, we can slow this, you know’. So, yeah, I try to tell people that it’s not perfect, but we’re moving in the right direction, and this is the first step after a hundred years of research,” explained Rostad.

This technology was approved by the FDA back in 2023.

The neurologist told FOX 21 that this injection has already been a game changer for Alzheimer’s disease.