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Scientists said Monday they had developed a way to predict whether patients will develop Alzheimer’s disease by analyzing their blood, in what experts hailed as a potential “game changer” in the fight against the debilitating condition.
About 50 million people are living with Alzheimer’s, a degenerative brain disease that accounts for more than half of global dementia cases.
Although its precise mechanism is not fully understood, Alzheimer’s appears to result from the accumulation of proteins in the brain that are thought to lead to the death of neurons.
Some of these proteins are detectable in patients’ blood, and tests based on their concentrations can be used to diagnose the disease.
Scientists in Sweden and Britain now believe that blood tests can be used to predict Alzheimer’s years before symptoms appear.
Writing 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 in the same patients over the course of four years.
They said that while more research was needed, their prediction method could have a significant impact on Alzheimer’s cases, as blood test “plasma biomarkers” are “promising due to their high accessibility and low cost.”
Richard Oakley, head of research at the Alzheimer’s Society, said the main struggle in the fight against the disease was diagnosing cases early enough to intervene with experimental treatments.
“If these blood biomarkers can predict Alzheimer’s in larger and more diverse groups, we could see a revolution in the way we test new drugs for dementia,” he said.
Musaid Husain, a 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 predict the risk of later development of Alzheimer’s disease in people with mild cognitive symptoms,” said Husain, who was not involved in the study.
“We need further validation (of the findings), but in the context of other recent findings this could be a transformative step towards early diagnosis, as well as testing new treatments in the early stages of the disease.”
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