New blood tests could help doctors diagnose Alzheimer’s disease more quickly and accurately, researchers reported, although some appear to work much better than others.
It is difficult to know if memory problems are caused by Alzheimer’s. To do this, it is necessary to confirm one of the hallmarks of the disease (the buildup of a sticky protein called beta-amyloid) through a difficult-to-obtain brain scan or an uncomfortable spinal tap. Many patients are diagnosed based on symptoms and cognitive tests.
Laboratories have begun offering a series of tests that can detect certain signs of Alzheimer’s in the blood. Scientists are excited about their potential, but the tests are not yet widely used because There is little data to guide physicians on which type to order and when. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration The FDA has not formally approved any of them and there is hardly any insurance coverage.
“Which tests can we trust?” asks Dr. Suzanne Schindler, a neurologist at Washington University in St. Louis who is involved in a research project on the subject. While some are highly accurate, “Other tests are not much better than flipping a coin.”
Blood tests, scans and more to detect Alzheimer’s
More than 6 million people in the United States and millions more worldwide suffer from Alzheimer’s, the most common form of dementia. Its telltale “biomarkers” are: amyloid plaques that clog the brain and abnormal tau protein that gives rise to tangles that kill neurons.
The new drugs Leqembi and Kisunla can modestly slow the worsening of symptoms by clearing amyloid from the brain. But they only work in the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s and Demonstrating that patients are eligible in a timely manner can be difficultMeasuring amyloid in spinal fluid is invasive. A special PET scanner to detect plaques is expensive, and getting an appointment can take months.
Even specialists can have a hard time determining whether a patient’s symptoms are due to Alzheimer’s or another disease. “It is not uncommon for patients to have symptoms that are I am convinced that they have Alzheimer’s, but I test them and they come back negative”explains Schindler.
Until now, blood tests have been used mostly in carefully controlled research settings. But a new study conducted with Some 1,200 patients in Sweden have shown that they can also function in the hustle and bustle of the real world. from doctors’ offices, especially primary care offices, which see many more people with memory problems than specialists but have fewer tools to assess them.
In the study, patients who saw a primary care doctor or specialist for memory problems received an initial diagnosis through traditional testing, donated blood for testing, and underwent a confirmatory spinal tap or brain scan.
Blood tests were much more accurate, researchers at the University of California, San Diego reported. Lund University at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference held recently in Philadelphia. The initial diagnosis by primary care physicians was accurate in 61% and that by specialists in 73%, but The blood test was 91% successful, according to the results, Also published in the magazine Journal of the American Medical Association.
Which blood tests are best for detecting Alzheimer’s? Doctors and researchers agree that Only analyses with an accuracy rate greater than 90% should be used.and Those most likely to detect it are those that measure p-tau27.
