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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
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday April 09 2018, @10:32PM (1 child)
That's why insurance will fail to pay for it - your medical picture cannot be changed by knowing at this time, so diagnostically it is not a meaningful test. (Maybe in a later year it might make a difference to starting some early intervention strategy.)
That said, as others indicated it may be useful to know in order to plan for the future.
And on the Gripping Hand, the abstract (and implied in the summary) indicates this is an indicator test. Because it false negatives 30% (at least it only correctly identified 70%) and false positives 9%, and has only 86% accuracy, what this test does is give a prelimary result and on the results of it one may want to proceed to further testing (again likely at one's own expense). One might still obtain Alzheimer's with a negative result, and one may positive without having it. So I wouldn't bet the farm on the results from this test, alone, telling anything useful for planning purposes.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 09 2018, @10:49PM
Insurance will absolutely pay for it as "preventative medicine." Of course, they will then find a reason in the next few years to drop you, raise your rate, or change your pool.