11% of patients with dementia symptoms have a reversible condition. Did you know?

One of the most surprising things I learned at DOC in October 2025 came during this session (and that's saying a lot because I learned a ton in just a couple of days) about brain disease breakthroughs. Moderated by Eric Verdin, it featured amazing insights from Li Gan, Claire Clelland. But the most unexpected piece came from David Jones, M.D., who is analyzing FDG-PET/CT scans from "dementia" patients (a diagnostic imaging procedure that combines PET and CT technology to map metabolic activity in the brain using a radioactive sugar tracer, 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG), which is absorbed by high-glucose-consuming cells, allowing for precise, colored, and functional mapping of malignancies).

His team developed an AI-augmented tool which looks for patterns that can help diagnose 9 different types of dementia (link). By visualizing the data of many patients on one dimension-reduction plot, he can see different clusters that correspond to different types of dementia. "Each dot is a patient, and how close together they are, how similar their brains are. And you can see if you could describe the whole field of neuro behavioral neurology in one slide."

Here is the shocking bit: "[we] looked at 15,000 scans at Mayo Clinic and ran the tool. [...] There’s different forms of Alzheimer’s disease. We found 11% had this condition called normal pressure hydrocephalus. What is that? That causes dementia symptoms, and it’s 100% treatable."

Jones shares the story of a patient: "Every doctor he saw. I know you have dementia. It’s one of these. I don’t know what it is, but I can tell you there’s no treatment. [...] He came to see us and we could say, well, here’s all these different possible ways you could get dementia. Which one did it to you? He landed right there. That’s the non degenerative cause and that’s surgically reversible. So we did surgery that week. And now he says I can enjoy time with my family again. I can go out with my friends. I can even go down do my own taxes. These are moments that I thought I’d lost forever."