Breakthrough in Alzheimer's diagnosis, new blood test method can detect the disease with 100% accuracy

The most terrifying aspect of Alzheimer’s disease is the fact there is no vaccines or preventive measures. Once you have this disease than there is no stopping: this inevitability associated with this disease make us helpless with little hope of recovery, because we don’t have a treatment or cure.

Now researchers have reported that they successfully detected the disease at early stages with a blood test. What implications it has for patients and researchers. For patients, early detection before its symptoms start appearing would give patients a chance to slow the progression; and for researchers it would allow them to monitor how it develops?

With the completion of ‘proof of concept’ trial of this blood test method, the team associated with the study reported an ‘unparalleled accuracy’.

"It is now generally believed that Alzheimer's-related changes begin in the brain at least a decade before the emergence of telltale symptoms," says one of the team, Robert Nagele from the Rowan University School of Osteopathic Medicine and Durin Technologies, Inc. 

"To the best of our knowledge, this is the first blood test using autoantibody biomarkers that can accurately detect Alzheimer's at an early point in the course of the disease when treatments are more likely to be beneficial - that is, before too much brain devastation has occurred." 

During the course of research work, an early stage of Alzheimer’s disease called mild cognitive impairment (MCI) was detected and then it was compared with similar cases of mental decline that were caused by other factors such as vascular issues, chronic depression, alcohol abuse, and the side effects of certain drugs.

The trial involved 236 participants including 50 who diagnosed with MCI, 50 with mild-moderate Alzheimer’s disease, and the remainder had been diagnosed with mild-moderate Parkinson's disease, early-stage Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis, or breast cancer.

Using a biomarker method, the team successfully detected mild-moderate Alzheimer's (98.7 percent), early-stage Parkinson's disease (98.0 percent), multiple sclerosis (100 percent) and breast cancer (100 percent).

The team described results as exciting but pointed to the need to test it on a much larger and more diverse sample.

Knowing about Alzheimer’s earlier rather than later, would not prevent the disease from developing, but it would allow patients to sign up for clinical trials of new drugs and treatments and most importantly they can learn how to slow down its progression, the team reports in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia. 

 With tests like this, it can be fairly hoped that knowing the disease better in its early stages would enable us to figure out how it begins, and how to prevent it.