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PARIS, France – Scientists said on Monday they had developed a way to predict whether patients will develop Alzheimer’s disease by testing their blood, which experts have called a potential “game changer” in the fight against debilitating disease.
About 50 million people live with Alzheimer’s disease, a degenerative disease of the brain that accounts for more than half of the cases of dementia worldwide.
Although its precise mechanism is not fully understood, Alzheimer’s disease appears to result from the build-up of proteins in the brain that are thought to lead to the death of neurons.
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Some of these proteins are traceable in the blood of patients and tests based on their concentrations can be used to diagnose the disease.
Swedish and British scientists now believe that blood tests can be used to predict Alzheimer’s disease years before symptoms appear.
In the journal Nature Aging, they described how they developed and validated individual risk models based on the levels of two key proteins in blood samples taken from more than 550 patients with minor cognitive impairment.
The model, based on these two proteins, had an 88% success rate in predicting the onset of Alzheimer’s disease in the same patients over a four-year period.
They said that although more research is needed, their method of prediction could have a significant impact on Alzheimer’s cases, given that “plasma biomarkers” from blood tests are “promising due to their high accessibility and of their low cost ”.
Richard Oakley, head of research at the Alzheimer Society, said the main battle in the fight against the disease is to diagnose cases early enough to intervene with experimental treatments.
“If these blood biomarkers can predict Alzheimer’s disease in larger and more diverse groups, we could see a revolution in how we test new drugs for dementia,” he said.
Musaid Husain, professor of neurology at the University of Oxford, described Monday’s research as a “potential game changer”.
“For the first time, we have a blood test that can well predict the risk of further development of Alzheimer’s disease in people who have mild cognitive symptoms,” said Husain, who was not involved in the study.
“We need additional validation [of the results] but in the context of other recent findings, this could be a transformational step towards earlier diagnosis, as well as testing new treatments at early stages of the disease.
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