The Alzheimer's test predicts the onset of up to 20 years in advance | Society

US researchers have developed a blood test that can detect signs of Alzheimer's disease for up to 20 years before the disease begins to debilitate.

Scientists at the University of Washington School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri say the test can identify changes in the brain that evoke Alzheimer's disease with 94% accuracy, while being much more economical and simple than a PET scan.

The results of this study, published Thursday in the journal Neurology, represent a potential advance in the fight against the disease.

"At present, we are selecting patients for clinical trials with brain scans, which takes time and money, and registration of participants takes years," said Lead author, Randall Bateman, Professor of Neurology.

"But with a blood test, we could potentially track thousands of people every month. This means we can more effectively enroll participants in clinical trials, which will help us find treatments faster and could have a huge impact on the cost of the disease as well as the human suffering that goes with it. "

The researchers said they found a way to measure levels of beta-amyloid protein, a key indicator of Alzheimer's disease, in the blood. They can then use these levels to predict whether the protein has accumulated in the brain.

This badysis could then be combined with two other major Alzheimer risk factors – age and the presence of the APOE4 genetic variant – to accurately identify relevant changes in the brain.

The researchers said that protein clumps were beginning to form in the brain up to two decades before the onset of the characteristic memory loss, suggesting that tests could be used to predict the years of Alzheimer's to l & # 39; advance.

However, the benefits of such tests would not be fully exploited until treatments to control the disease are developed.

In January 2018, a team of scientists unveiled their work on a test using mbad spectrometry techniques to identify patients with abnormal peptide in the blood plasma, indicating beta-amyloid accumulation in the brain.

The last study involved 158 people over 50 years old. All but 10 of the new study participants were cognitively normal and each provided at least one blood sample and underwent PET scan.

The researchers found that blood tests gave the same results as PET scans in 88% of cases, which was not satisfactory. In order to improve accuracy, scientists have begun to incorporate other risk factors, increasing accuracy to over 90%.