Blood-Based Tool Predicts Risk of Alzheimer’s Disease Diagnosis Within 17 Years

DEMAND your doctor give you this test so you can supercharge your dementia prevention protocols. Assuming your doctor even has any protocols for that. If not find a new competent doctor. 

Blood-Based Tool Predicts Risk of Alzheimer’s Disease Diagnosis Within 17 Years

Using an immuno-infrared sensor that detects the misfolding of amyloid-beta in plasma, researchers have been able to identify signs of Alzheimer’s disease in the blood up to 17 years before the first clinical symptoms appear.

The research is published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia.

“Our goal is to determine the risk of developing Alzheimer’s dementia at a later stage with a simple blood test even before the toxic plaques can form in the brain, in order to ensure that a therapy can be initiated in time,” said Klaus Gerwert, PhD, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Bochum, Germany.

The researchers analysed blood plasma from participants in the ESTHER, which was conducted in Saarland, Germany, with the aim of looking for potential Alzheimer’s biomarkers. The blood samples had been taken between 2000 and 2002 and were then frozen. At that time, the test participants were aged between 50 and 75 years and hadn’t yet been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

For the current study, 68 participants were selected who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease during the 17-year follow-up, and they were compared with 240 control subjects who did not have Alzheimer’s disease during the follow-up.

The immuno-infrared sensor was able to identify the 68 test subjects who later developed Alzheimer’s disease with a high degree of test accuracy.

For comparison, the researchers examined other biomarkers with the complementary, highly sensitive SIMOA technology, specifically the P-tau181 biomarker, which is currently being proposed as a promising biomarker candidate in various studies.

“Unlike in the clinical phase, however, this marker is not suitable for the early symptom-free phase of Alzheimer’s disease,” said Dr. Gerwert. “Surprisingly, we found that the concentration of GFAP [glial fibre protein] can indicate the disease up to 17 years before the clinical phase, even though it does so much less precisely than the immuno-infrared sensor.”

Still, by combining amyloid-beta misfolding and GFAP concentration, the researchers were able to further increase the accuracy of the test in the symptom-free stage.

“We plan to use the misfolding test to establish a screening method for older people and determine their risk of developing Alzheimer’s dementia,” said Dr. Gerwert. “

Even though the sensor is still in the development phase, the invention has already been patented worldwide. The researchers aim to bring the immuno-infrared sensor to market and have it approved as a diagnostic device so that it can be used in clinical labs.

“The exact timing of therapeutic intervention will become even more important in the future,” said Léon Beyer, Ruhr-Universität Bochum. “The success of future drug trials will depend on the study participants being correctly characterised and not yet showing irreversible damage at study entry.”

Reference: https://alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/alz.12745

SOURCE: Ruhr-University Bochum