The members of the Amyloid imaging to prevent Alzheimer’s disease (AMYPAD) project have announced the publication of a perspective review on the interpretability and clinical application of the Centiloid (CL) scale, a robust method for measuring amyloid plaques in the brain, a key hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association, this work includes the context-of-use recommendations and aims to provide guidelines for the implementation of the CL scale in clinical practice, ensuring its reliability and accuracy for diagnosing and monitoring AD across different settings.
In recent years, AMYPAD researchers have played a pivotal role in validating the CL scale as a robust and reliable method for quantifying amyloid deposition in the brain, independent of the radiotracer used in PET imaging. The CL scale provides a unified and standardised framework for comparing data across different PET imaging tracers and quantification pipelines, enabling a more accurate assessment of amyloid burden. These findings have been consolidated into an application for a Biomarker Qualification Opinion (BQO) to the European Medicines Agency (EMA). The EMA’s Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP) has recognised the Centiloid unit for measuring brain amyloid levels as a validated measure of global amyloid load in the brain, if properly used with quality control procedures.
The emerging era of anti-amyloid therapies relies heavily on amyloid-PET imaging for patient selection, evaluation of target engagement and assessment of drug effectiveness. For these therapies, the Centiloid scale offers a robust, tracer-independent and validated metric that accurately reflects the degree of amyloid pathology in the brain, making it an ideal tool for use in clinical settings.