Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia, but diagnosis remains a challenge, especially during the early stages of the disease. A group of American scientists have developed a new detection method based on a simple blood test that facilitates the task and avoids other more expensive and painful tests.
Alzheimer’s is an incurable and terminal neurodegenerative disease. If you have had the misfortune of having a close relative with this disease, you will know that it is terrible due to the cognitive deterioration and behavioral disorders that it causes in patients. It usually appears after the age of 65, although there are cases from the age of 40. Can be confused with attitudes related to old age and hence the need for an early diagnosis that -even without a cure- makes it possible to address the disease with techniques and medication as soon as possible that can at least mitigate it.
For an accurate diagnosis, it is necessary to detect different markers, abnormal accumulations of amyloid proteins and neurodegeneration, the slow and progressive loss of neuronal cells in specific regions of the brain. Current diagnostic techniques involve a combination of brain imaging done with special scanners and CSF analysis. The first are very expensive and not always accessible, and in the case of the lumbar potion, painful.
Diagnosis of Alzheimer’s only with a blood test
It is obvious that using only a reliable blood test would be a very important step to detect the disease. Although current blood tests can accurately detect abnormalities in amyloid and tau proteins, it has been more difficult to detect markers of nerve cell damage that are specific to the brain. Scientists at the University of Pittsburgh, in Pennsylvania, have developed an antibody-based assay capable of detecting a tau protein specific to Alzheimer’s disease.
The research has been published in the journal Brain and was carried out on 600 patients in various stages of Alzheimer’s disease, finding that the levels of the protein used were related to the levels of the CSF (cerebrospinal fluid collection). and could reliably distinguish Alzheimer’s from other neurodegenerative diseases. The protein levels also correlated closely with the severity of amyloid plaques and tau tangles in the brain tissue of people who died of this disease.
“A blood test is cheaper, safer and easier to administer, and can improve clinical confidence in the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease and the selection of participants for clinical trial and disease monitoring”explained the person in charge of the investigation.
The next step will be to validate the test in a broader range of patients, including those of various racial and ethnic backgrounds, and those suffering from different stages of memory loss or other potential symptoms of dementia. The scientists hope that monitoring the levels of this tau protein through a simple blood test could improve the design of clinical trials for Alzheimer’s disease treatments.
Via | Guardian
