Double diagnostics
New Diagnosis Predicts Alzheimer's Disease 10 years before symptoms appear
Georgy Golovanov, Hi-tech+
The method proposed by German scientists consists of two stages – measurement of amyloid and tau proteins in blood and cerebrospinal fluid. It makes it possible to better identify patients at the earliest stages of Alzheimer's disease.
The main hypothesis explaining the cause of this disease is the accumulation of toxic amyloid and tau proteins in the brain, which leads to neurodegenerative damage associated with loss of cognitive abilities. However, a number of failures of clinical trials of therapies aimed at reducing the level of these proteins have forced many researchers to rethink this hypothesis. Some of them are looking for other causes, others still adhere to the protein hypothesis, but emphasize that the disease should be treated before symptoms appear, according to a press release from Ruhr-Universität Bochum Early-stage detection of Alzheimer's in the blood.
Experts at Ruhr University suggest that the key to effective treatment is exposure to the disease before amyloids have accumulated in the brain.
In their opinion, if neurodegenerative damage has occurred, it is impossible to reverse it so easily. "It seems that once the amyloid plaques have formed, the disease can no longer be cured," says Andreas Nabers, head of the research group.
Previous studies have shown that a blood test for beta-amyloid detects Alzheimer's disease eight years before the onset of clinical symptoms in about 71% of the participants in the experiment. Such accuracy is not enough to apply the test in medical practice, so scientists have developed a second diagnostic tool that tracks the level of tau protein.
The combination of the two types of analysis allowed to increase the accuracy to 87% and reduce the number of false positive results to 3 out of 100.
The second analysis requires the collection of cerebrospinal fluid. Scientists admit that this procedure is not ideal due to its invasive nature, and plan to find a more effective way to detect tau proteins in a blood sample. However, in its current form, this two-step method can be applied in the near future.
Article by Nabers et al. Aß and tau structure-based biomarkers for a blood- and CSF-based two-step recruitment strategy to identify patients with dementia due to Alzheimer's disease is published in the journal Alzheimer's and Dementia: Diagnosis, Assessment and Disease Monitoring.
At the end of last year, American scientists developed a non-invasive test to detect tau protein in the patient's blood. To do this, they identified a subset of proteins whose levels increase in Alzheimer's disease, and identified a biomarker that can become the basis for diagnosis.
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