Scientists have developed a simple blood test that may help detect Alzheimer’s disease eight years before the first clinical symptoms occur.
Using current techniques, Alzheimer’s disease, the most frequent cause of dementia, can only be detected once the typical plaques have formed in the brain, said researchers from Ruhr-Universitat Bochum (RUB) in Germany.
At this point, therapy seems no longer possible, they said.
However, the first changes caused by Alzheimer’s take place on the protein level up to 20 years earlier.
A two-tier method, described in the journal Alzheimer’s and Dementia: Diagnosis, Assessment and Disease Monitoring, can help detect the disease at a much earlier stage.
“This has paved the way for early-stage therapy approaches, where the as yet inefficient drugs on which we had pinned our hopes may prove effective,” said Professor Klaus Gerwert from RUB.
