so this is amazing. you re looking at scans of murderers, of schizophrenics, normal brain scans, p.e.t. scans and your own brain scan. you discover that in your own brain it is the same kind of brain as a psychopath. yes. it was like the worst case. because all those areas of the brain that i had decided by looking at these that were involved in the psychopathic personality, i had all of them. and it was completely turned off. it had to do with emotional regulation. so you can actually see in a brain scan if somebody is a psychopath? not really. what you can see are changes consistent with traits. i can look at different brain scans and say that person s got a language problem, that person a problem with their visual system or sense of space. you can see traits. traits of a psychopath that are clear to you that you think you have are what? well, it s a very poor sense of morality, first of all.
you get a cat scan for that. the pet scan study is promising, but i m not convinced it s going to change the way we practice. it s a very small study, only about 80 patients and accurate in about 90%. we still have a long way to go for pet scans to come in this field. now, we use pet scan in our field of cancer, for lung ca cancer, for kidney cancer, and it s 50/50 can guess whether there s cancer in the body. for bone imaging, it would work. explain why, doctor. what does it show that a cat scan doesn t? they re using a radio tracer to see where the aggregate of the cells. sometimes with this plaque formation, you would have inflammation. it detects when the plaque ruptures. that s where the plaque starts to go to a blocked artery, heart attack, or go to the brain and cause a stroke. nobody knows the cause of plaque rupture, what we know is 60 million americans suffer from coronary artery disease and any of these studies are important.
diagnosing disease, whether it be cancer or another disease. the problem is, it basically revolves around things like radioactive isotopes, these radioactive elements that spontaneously decay and emit radiation. those can be used to fight disease or treat sddisease. the problem with these isotopes is they re very short lived, so they have to go to great lengths to get them to the hospital to treat patients. they sometimes use jets because the isotopes are so short-lived. i had the idea, why conti develop a device that produces these isotopes on-site at the hospital? it was incredibly expensive and could potentially be wheeled into a hospital room. so he s now figured out a way to make the isotopes more portable. that s what he s working on. and that way they can have pet scans in remote parts of the world that they can t right now. he thinks if he can get these in locally in hospitals, that will be a better way to diagnose
care that they can t afford to pay out of pocket, pet scans that shows how much cancer you have in your body, $14,000. who has the money to pay for that. i went on to ask dan about republicans repeeling obama care for the 38th time. how dufl when you see congress trying to repeal obama care? it s very difficult to try to comprehend. i understand lawmakers have their own agendas, but, you know, you don t know if you don t know someone who is in this type of situation that i m in and there s millions of other people like me, i mean it s just, i can t comprehend it. can t understand why one would work you know against this type of policy which is really going to make the lives of so many people so much easier. yeah. why? why would republicans do this?
mris and pet scans and spinal fluid they can differentiate in a large percentage of the cases between alzheimer s and front temporal dementia. only the mri may be enough. that is exciting. if we can use the latest type of mri to tell us different types of dementia we will know which to target with the new treatment. you mentioned a pet scan. what is that? that looks at heat. how much radiation or how much heat something gives off. is very expensive and to take someone who is debilitated and having problems with dementia and start giving them spinal taps and putting them in pet scanners where they take several hours it would be a lot better to use an mri alone and get right to new treatments. spinal tap s an invasive procedure that involves bleeding and infection. and some people are are allergic. they can have reaction to this but it is expensive. and with mri is it is less