Medicare Delays Coverage Decision on Alzheimer’s Imaging Test

The Medicare agency is pushing back a proposed coverage determination on brain scans to aid in the detection of Alzheimer’s as it considers new data on a potential treatment for the memory-loss disease.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said in an emailed statement Thursday that the availability of new evidence required it to delay its decision on coverage for beta amyloid positron emission tomography (PET) in dementia and neurodegenerative disease. The update on the proposal, which was initially scheduled to be released Friday, comes as patient groups have repeatedly called for greater access to the testing used to ...