Prospects of imaging retinal amyloid beta using fluorescent probes for early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease

Alzheimer’s Disease is the most common cause of dementia amongst older adults, affecting more than 55 million people globally. Identifying accessibility concerns for conventional methods used for diagnostics, this review focuses on an alternative approach detecting amyloid beta in the retina. The utility of this biomarker is yet to be verified due to the low number of in vivo studies in AD patients, as well as the need for further investigation on the subtle differences between cerebral and retinal patterns of amyloid deposition. However, this approach has shown great promise as recent in vivo studies of larger sample sizes are conducted. Exemplifying the applications of curcumin, this paper also examines current methodologies in rAβ research and evaluates the outlook of chemically modifying fluorescent probes for oligomeric selectivity.