A New Hope in Alzheimer's Diagnosis

The focus on much current Alzheimer’s research is on determining if experimental drugs that have failed in past clinical trials will be effective if they are started before people show any clinical symptoms of the disease. There are trials now underway to test this hypothesis.

One major challenge for these trials is to identify a large enough group of asymptomatic people who can be reliably determined to have a high probability of developing  Alzheimer’s within the next several years. Today, the tests used to identify such populations – PET scans that show amyloid plaques in the brain and spinal taps that reveal if someone has high levels of amyloid in the spinal fluid – are invasive, expensive, and not highly predictive. There is concern that the results of the current trials may not be conclusive, or may reach incorrect conclusions if  the subject population cannot be shown to be at high risk for developing the disease.

Researchers gained new hope this week when Professor Howard Federoff of Georgetown University reported that Georgetown researchers had developed a blood test that predicted with 90% accuracy whether an individual would develop mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer’s disease within the next three years. This report was published in a letter in the online edition of Nature Medicine.

To see the rest of this story and extra video content from Professor Howard Federoff visit our full blog piece at: http://whiteoakcottages.com/hope-for-a-new-diagnostic-tool/