For many years, the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s has been based on the characterization of amyloid plaques and tau tangles within the brain, usually when someone dies. A cheap and widely available blood test for the presence of plaques and tangles would have a profound impact on Alzheimer’s analysis and care. According to the new study, measurements of phosphor-tau217 (p-tau217), one of the tau proteins found in tangles, could give a relatively sensitive and accurate indicator of both plaques and tangles — corresponding to the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s — in living individuals.
“The p-tau217 blood test has nice promise within the diagnosis, early detection, and study of Alzheimer’s,” aforesaid Oskar Hansson, MD, Ph.D., professor of Clinical Memory research at Lund University, Sweden, who leads the Swedish BioFINDER Study and senior author on the study who spearheaded the international cooperative effort. Researchers evaluated a brand new p-tau217 blood test in 1,402 cognitively impaired and intact analysis participants from well-known studies in Arizona, Sweden, and the Republic of Colombia. The study, which was coordinated from Lund University in Sweden, enclosed 81 Arizona participants in Banner Sun Health Research Institute’s Brain Donation program who had clinical assessments and provided blood samples in their final life years and then had neuropathological assessments after they died.
In the Arizona BSHRI Brain Donation Cohort, the plasma p-tau217 assay discriminated between Arizona Brain donors with and without the following neuropathological diagnosis of “intermediate or high probability Alzheimer’s” the percentage is about 89% Accuracy; it distinguished between those with and without a diagnosis of “high chance Alzheimer’s” with 98% Accuracy, and higher ptau217 measurements were correlated with higher brain tangle counts only in those persons who also had amyloid plaques.
As the research shows, persons with the clinical diagnoses of Alzheimer’s and different neurodegenerative diseases with 96% Accuracy, like tau PET scans and CSF biomarkers and better than many other blood tests and MRI measurements; and it distinguished between those with and while not an abnormal tau PET scan with 93% Accuracy.
There’s way more to do than anticipated, their impact in each the research and clinical setting can become readily apparent within the next 2 years.” Alzheimer’s may be a debilitating and incurable illness that affects an estimated 5.8 million Americans age 65 and older. Without the invention of successful prevention therapies, the number of U.S. Cases is projected to achieve nearly 14 million by 2050.
