{"id":888,"date":"2020-08-26T09:32:18","date_gmt":"2020-08-26T09:32:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/clinlabint.3wstaging.nl\/a-new-blood-test-useful-to-detect-people-at-risk-of-developing-alzheimers-disease\/"},"modified":"2021-01-08T11:08:46","modified_gmt":"2021-01-08T11:08:46","slug":"a-new-blood-test-useful-to-detect-people-at-risk-of-developing-alzheimers-disease","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/clinlabint.com\/a-new-blood-test-useful-to-detect-people-at-risk-of-developing-alzheimers-disease\/","title":{"rendered":"A new blood test useful to detect people at risk of developing Alzheimer\u2019s disease"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is as yet no cure for Alzheimer\u2019s disease. It is often argued that progress in drug research has been hampered by the fact that the disease can only be diagnosed when it is too late for an effective intervention. Alzheimer\u2019s disease is thought to begin long before patients show typical symptoms like memory loss. Scientists have now developed a blood test for Alzheimer\u2019s disease and found that it can detect early indicators of the disease long before the first symptoms appear in patients. The blood test would thus offer an opportunity to identify those at risk and may thereby open the door to new avenues in drug discovery. <\/span>
\nOne of the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease is the accumulation of amyloid-\u03b2 plaques in the patient\u2019s brain. The blood test, developed by Klaus Gerwert and his team at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, works by measuring the relative amounts of a pathological and a healthy form of amyloid-\u03b2 in the blood. The pathological form is a misfolded version of this molecule and known to initiate the formation of toxic plaques in the brain. Toxic amyloid-\u03b2 molecules start accumulating in the patients\u2019 body 15-20 years before disease onset. In the present study, Gerwert and colleagues from Germany and Sweden addressed whether the blood test would be able to pick up indications of pathological amyloid-\u03b2 in very early phases of the disease.<\/span>
\nThe researchers first focused on patients in the early, so called prodromal stages of the disease from the Swedish BioFINDER cohort conducted by Oskar Hanson. They found that the test reliably detected amyloid-\u03b2 alterations in the blood of participants with mild cognitive impairment that also showed abnormal amyloid deposits in brain scans.<\/span>
\nIn a next step, Gerwert and colleagues investigated if their assay was able to detect blood changes well ahead of disease onset. They used data from the ESTHER cohort study, which Hermann Brenner started in 2000 at DKFZ, comparing blood samples of 65 participants that were later in the follow-up studies diagnosed with Alzheimer\u2019s disease with 809 controls. The assay was able to detect signs of the disease on average eight years before diagnosis in individuals without clinical symptoms. It correctly identified those with the disease in almost 70% of the cases, while about 9% of true negative subjects would wrongly be detected as positive. The overall diagnostic accuracy was 86%.<\/span>
\nCurrently available diagnostic tools for Alzheimer\u2019s disease either involve expensive positron emission tomography (PET) brain scans, or analyse samples of cerebrospinal fluid that are extracted via lumbar puncture. The researchers suggest that their blood test serves as a cheap and simple option to pre-select individuals from the general population for further testing by these more invasive and costly methods to exclude the falsely positive subjects.<\/span>
\nEMBOwww.embo.org\/news\/press-releases\/2018\/a-new-blood-test-useful-to-detect-people-at-risk-of-developing-alzheimer-s-disease<\/link><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is as yet no cure for Alzheimer\u2019s disease. It is often argued that progress in drug research has been hampered by the fact that the disease can only be diagnosed when it is too late for an effective intervention. Alzheimer\u2019s disease is thought to begin long before patients show typical symptoms like memory loss. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-e-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/clinlabint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/888"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/clinlabint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/clinlabint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clinlabint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clinlabint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=888"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/clinlabint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/888\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/clinlabint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clinlabint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clinlabint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}