A Blood Test for Early Detection of Alzheimer

A blood test is developed by a group of Scientists in Japan and Australia that will now help doctors to detect Alzheimer disease before it attacks you. The scientists have claimed the blood test is a revolutionary discovery after decades of scientific research and hard work as, so far there is no treatment that can slow the progression of Alzheimer disease.

Alzheimer is a disease that starts developing years before the patients have any symptoms of memory loss. The present discovery will now help in the detection of the presence of the disease up to 20 years before symptoms begin and therefore it is going to benefit people at large.

According to the study published in Science Journal Nature, Scientists have claimed that the test can detect a toxic protein linked to Alzheimer also known as amyloid beta 90 percent accurately in the research.

The blood test used a highly specialized and sensitive mass spectrometry technique to measure extremely low concentrations of the peptide in the blood plasma samples of two patient groups involving around 370 people, 252 Australians and 121 in a Japanese group. The participants included healthy people, people with mild cognitive decline and the people with Alzheimer's disease.

According to Brisbane-based CSIRO scientist James Doecke, who was also involved in the research, said blood had been consistently collected from the two groups of people every 18 months since 2006. "It's been a very difficult journey," Dr Doecke said, “a number of lab tests are being done across the world who are trying to find out protein in the blood which can be easily tested by the scientists, as they are correlated with the disease and so far nobody has come up with such positive results something which is strong. Previously we've only been 80 per cent accurate and now we're greater than 90 percent what it means is that we can better direct our clinical trials to the right population.”

The beginning of Alzheimer's can come to anyone as early as 30 years before the patient experiences any symptoms, such as memory loss. There is no concrete test to determine early onset of dementia and patients with cognitive impairment are diagnosed based on a careful evaluation using brain scans and concise mental testing, according to the Alzheimer’s Society United Kingdom.

The most common form of Alzheimer is Dementia, disease with memory lose and which affects nearly 50 million people across the world and according to a study it is expected to affected more than 131 million by 2050, conducted by the non-profit campaign group Alzheimer's Disease International.

Doctors mostly do brain scanning which is also known as invasive cerebrospinal fluid testing or spinal tap to try and see whether patients have a build up of amyloid beta in the brain. Unfortunately they are expensive and may show results only when the disease has already started to spread.

Katsuhiko Yanagisawa, who co-led the Nature study at the Japanese National Centre for Geriatrics and Gerontology has said, “having a simple, low-cost blood test could make it easier for the companies which produces medicine to find large number of people who are at the risk of developing Alzheimer's, to test and develop potential new drugs to fight the disease”.

Professor Colin Masters from the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health has been working on Alzheimer's disease for 30 years. Professor Masters added the blood test would make diagnosis easier, cheaper and more broadly available than the current invasive and expensive options.

Colin Masters, also a professor at the University of Melbourne who co-led the research says, “now with this test you have got to walk before you run, at the same time one has to learn to diagnose the disease directly before one can hope to see the effect of the therapeutic intervention and that's where the real value in this test will come.”

Up to 40 per cent of people over 70 years old are at risk of Alzheimer's disease due to the beta-amyloid in their brains. In 2016, an estimated 354,000 Australians had dementia. Alzheimer's disease affects over 5 million people in the United States of America, where the estimated cost of caring for Alzheimer patients in 2017 was $259 billion. In the United Kingdom, there are more than 520,000 people affected by the disease, costing £26.3 billion, according to the Alzheimer’s Society.

The technique is currently only performed in a laboratory at Shimadzu Corporation in Japan, though the researchers were confidant they would be able to roll out the technology in the days to come. Japanese researcher Dr Kiochi Tanaka at Shimadzu Corporation, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2002 for the work, spearheaded the technique.