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posted by janrinok on Monday April 09 2018, @09:07PM   Printer-friendly
from the another-step-forward dept.

One of the hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease is the accumulation of amyloid-β plaques in the patient's brain. The blood test, developed by Klaus Gerwert and his team at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, works by measuring the relative amounts of a pathological and a healthy form of amyloid-β in the blood. The pathological form is a misfolded version of this molecule and known to initiate the formation of toxic plaques in the brain. Toxic amyloid-β molecules start accumulating in the patients' body 15-20 years before disease onset. In the present study, Gerwert and colleagues from Germany and Sweden addressed whether the blood test would be able to pick up indications of pathological amyloid-β in very early phases of the disease.

The researchers first focused on patients in the early, so called prodromal stages of the disease from the Swedish BioFINDER cohort conducted by Oskar Hanson. They found that the test reliably detected amyloid-β alterations in the blood of participants with mild cognitive impairment that also showed abnormal amyloid deposits in brain scans.

In a next step, Gerwert and colleagues investigated if their assay was able to detect blood changes well ahead of disease onset. They used data from the ESTHER cohort study, which Hermann Brenner started in 2000 at DKFZ, comparing blood samples of 65 participants that were later in the follow-up studies diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease with 809 controls. The assay was able to detect signs of the disease on average eight years before diagnosis in individuals without clinical symptoms. It correctly identified those with the disease in almost 70% of the cases, while about 9% of true negative subjects would wrongly be detected as positive. The overall diagnostic accuracy was 86%.

[...] The blood test will be extended to Parkinson disease by measuring another disease biomarker -- alpha-synuclein -- instead of amyloid-β.

Journal Reference: Andreas Nabers, Laura Perna, Julia Lange, Ute Mons, Jonas Schartner, Jörn Güldenhaupt, Kai‐Uwe Saum, Shorena Janelidze, Bernd Holleczek, Dan Rujescu, Oskar Hansson, Klaus Gerwert, Hermann Brenner. Amyloid blood biomarker detects Alzheimer's disease. EMBO Molecular Medicine, 2018; e8763 DOI: 10.15252/emmm.201708763


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 09 2018, @10:05PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 09 2018, @10:05PM (#664713)

    You can plan for your own way out, no need to die from the disease. Then again there are some pretty massive taboos against killing yourself which seem implicitly agreed to by your fatalistic approach. Personally I don't see why someone should be forced to suffer through the end of Alzheimers if they don't want to.