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Scientists said Monday they had developed a way to predict whether patients will develop Alzheimer’s disease by testing their blood, in what experts hailed as a possible “game changer” in the fight against the debilitating disease.
About 50 million people live with Alzheimer’s, a degenerative brain disease that accounts for more than half of dementia cases worldwide.
Although its precise mechanism is not fully understood, Alzheimer’s disease appears to be the result of the accumulation of proteins in the brain that are believed to lead to the death of neurons.
Some of these proteins can be traced in the blood of patients and tests based on their concentrations can be used to diagnose the disease.
Scientists from 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 impairments.
The model based on these two proteins had an 88 percent success rate in predicting the onset of Alzheimer’s disease in the same patients over the course of four years.
They said that while more research is needed, their prediction method could have a significant impact on Alzheimer’s cases, given that “plasma biomarkers” from blood tests are “promising due to their high accessibility and low cost.”
Richard Oakley, head of research at the Alzheimer’s Society, said the main fight to combat the disease was to diagnose cases early enough to intervene with experimental treatments.
“If these blood biomarkers can predict Alzheimer’s disease 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 well the risk of later development of Alzheimer’s disease in people who have mild cognitive symptoms,” said Husain, who was not involved in the study.
“We need further validation (of the results), but in the context of other recent findings, this could be a transformative step towards earlier diagnosis, as well as testing new treatments in earlier stages of the disease.”
