Assessing the threshold for in vivo detection of amyloid-beta plaques

Methods: We examined autopsied brain tissues from a 79 year-old man with the clinical diagnosis of dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB) and a negative PiB-PET scan (PiB(−)) obtained 1.5 years before death. Frontal, temporal, and occipital cortical tissue sections were fixed and processed using Bielschowsky silver staining, histofluorescent amyloid markers X-34 and 6-CN-PiB, and an array of Aβ antibodies against different portions of the Aβ peptide. Frozen tissue samples from multiple cortical regions, hippocampus, and cerebellum were assayed using Aβ1-42-specific enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and [H-3]PiB binding assay of homogenized brain tissues.