Alzheimer's disease can now be diagnosed in the living state and its progression can even be tracked phase after phase using a PET imaging technology, a new promising new study suggests.

As opposed to the conventional definitive means of diagnosing Alzheimer's only when patient has died, a new study on the disease found out that PET Imaging can diagnose patients in the living state and can even track the phase by phase progression of Alzheimer's.

While many diagnostic methods used today primarily target amyloid-beta in the brain, since this is the substance that forms into "brain gunk" or the so-called plaques in Alzheimer's patients, the new study makes use of new research tags or markers called tau. Tau forms into the well-known "tangles" in the patients' brains, and when it does this could not only lead to Alzheimer's but as well as other forms of dementia and even neurodegenerative disease.

Researchers said PET Imaging can help visualize the things that take place in the brain and can work as a complement to amyloid-beta messaging, to diagnose patients at the early stage of the disease - before symptoms start to manifest.

This promising study utilizes fluorescent tags that are capable of penetrating the blood-brain barrier and interlock with tau present in the brain, which will make the tau easily identifiable under PET scans.

Scientists have tried this method in mice and then in a handful of human patients. They found out that PET imaging shows the three dimensions of the brain regions, where tagged taus were accumulating.

"This promising early study highlights a potential new method for detecting tau - a key player in both Alzheimer's and frontotemporal dementia - in the living brain," Alzheimer's Research in the U.K. team member Eric Karran told BBC News. "If this method is shown to be effective, such a scan could also be a useful aid for providing people with an accurate diagnosis, as well as for monitoring disease progression."

However, the test is just as good as nothing if there are no effective treatments that can go hand-in-hand with the early diagnosis to hamper Alzheimer's progression.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has recently funded $45 million to potential Alzheimer's disease medication testing. The medication they wish to come up with is aimed at treating the disease in its early stage since brain pathology is believed to begin years prior to first symptoms start to manifest.

Karran said, "With new drugs in development designed to target tau, scans capable of visualising the protein inside the brain could be important for assessing whether treatments in clinical trials are hitting their target."

Forbes reported that it is very likely that a combination of early imaging, genetic testing, and biomarkers incorporation can lead to definitive diagnosis even before the disease symptoms unfold.

"We know that Alzheimer's-related brain changes take place years, even decades, before symptoms appear," National Institute of Aging Director Dr. Richard Hodes said. "That really may be the optimal window for drugs that delay progression or prevent the disease altogether. The clinical trials getting under way with these funds will test treatments in symptom-free volunteers at risk for the disease, or those in the very earliest stages-where we hope we can make the biggest difference."