Blood Test Finds Toxic Alzheimer's Proteins

A study published in Nature has led to a blood test that can detect the accumulation of toxic amyloid beta proteins linked with Alzheimer's disease, reports BBC News . Researchers from Japan and Australia developed an approach that looks for fragments of amyloid that end up in the blood stream. The team says the test is less expensive than brain scanning, "potentially enabling broader clinical access and efficient population screening." The test was found to be 90 percent accurate when tried out on healthy people, those with memory loss, and persons with Alzheimer's. "These data are very promising and may be incredibly useful in the future, in particular for choosing which people are suited for clinical trials and for measuring whether amyloid levels are changed by treatments in trials," says University of Edinburgh Professor Tara Spires-Jones. King's College London's Dr. Abdul Hye notes the procedure has major ramifications as it is the first time a group has shown a strong connection between blood plasma amyloid and brain and cerebrospinal fluid. "Considering Alzheimer's disease has a very long pre-clinical phase, a truer test will be how well this test performs in independent, healthy, cognitively normal individuals or even in individuals in the early stages of the disease," he notes.