Medical terminology

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Can someone please help me understand this in laymen’s terms.

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Emily 123

Hi,

I think it's describing the progression of the Alzheimer's, which typically travels as below.

It's saying the left and right sided parietal and frontal lobes of the brain are affected at this point, that the left sided lobes have progressed more than the right sided ones, and that the left side frontal lobe has a larger area affected than the right, and that the occipital lobe is unaffected so far.

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Super helpful. Thank you

Emily 123

I corrected it--It says the left frontal lobe has more affected area, but I had put parietal--my apologies...

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I do recall the dr saying if you’re right handed then your left brain will have issues. It was just so much and so not understandable for me or my mom who apparently has advanced Alzheimer’s.

Emily 123

I'm sorry. I know you know that each person has their own flavor of AD in terms of how it looks and what they can still do...

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Yea it’s so bizarre and off the wall. I’m really just trying to manage how to do this with my mom.

M1

Looks like it's part of a report from a PET scan- this is a type of brain scan that measures the uptake of radioactive glucose (sugar) in parts of the brain that are active. So when it says there were hypometabolic areas, that means that those parts of the brain were underactive and were not using as much sugar as they should have been. It's the closest we have to a functional brain test, but even then it's not very specific. Another use for PET scans is to find areas with too much glucose uptake, such as cancers.