A combined test to find out who will be suffering from Alzheimer's disease



[ad_1]

Through an Italian research – conducted by the Catholic University Agostino Gemelli Irccs Polytechnic University, in collaboration with the Irccs S. Raffaele Pisana – it will soon become possible to know who will fall ill from Alzheimer's disease through a combined, simple and inexpensive test: based on a blood sample and an electroencephalogram .

The test will target those with mild cognitive decline who are estimated to be 20 times more likely to become ill with dementia compared to healthy peers. Fortunately, of these, only half will actually develop the disease; Unfortunately, until now, it was not possible to predict who would get sick and who would not do it in a simple, economical and non-invasive way, requiring expensive exams such as the pet, magnetic resonance or lumbar puncture. on Annals of Neurology and coordinated by Paolo Maria Rossini, states that to date, in clinical practice, a similar test is missing, which can be of great help at a time for people with cognitive decline and for their families, to start medical and rehabilitation treatments as soon as possible, introduce the necessary changes in lifestyle and guide for the time choices that are difficult even in the face of the diagnosis of dementia .

The test demonstrated high accuracy, failing to give false or positive diagnoses. The blood sample is used to search for a mutation related to the risk of Alzheimer's disease, on the Apoe gene. While the signals recorded with the electroencephalogram are interpreted with a mathematical badysis that helps to understand how they are connected to each other different areas of the brain.

The mild cognitive decline that results from normal neuropsychological tests (which in general they are made for modest memory deficits or because there is a significant familiarity with dementia) is characterized by small defects that do not affect the patient's daily, emotional and professional life. In Italy there are currently about 735 thousand people with this type of mild cognitive decline. In one to five years of diagnosis, one in two will develop real dementia, experts say: the test was developed from the idea of ​​having a simple and inexpensive method, available throughout the country and non-invasive (as is the case for example for lumbar puncture)

[ad_2]
Source link