With hopes of coming up with a breakthrough cure for Alzheimer's disease, British scientists have developed a blood test that detects people with fading memories which could eventually develop into the disease.
Ten years into the study, Kings College London and Oxford University experts are convinced that they have found 10 proteins that show the imminence of Alzheimer's disease. This means clinical trials will soon start on people who do not have the disease yet to find out which drug could stop its onset.
"Alzheimer's begins to affect the brain many years before patients are diagnosed (and) many of our drug trials fail because by the time patients are given the drugs the brain has already been too severely affected," Research leader Simon Lovestone from Oxford University said. "A simple blood test could help us identify patients at a much earlier stage to take part in new trials and hopefully develop treatments."
The search for Alzheimer's disease treatments have failed in the past. From 2002 to 2012, 99.6 percent of trials intended to prevent or reverse the disease failed. Early identification in patients is one of the top priorities for research on dementia.
The new blood test is exactly that. It aims to detect people with mild cognitive impairment as 60 percent of these people will eventually develop dementia. Scientists want to recruit these people into trials to delay or prevent the start of Alzheimer's.
The test could be available as soon as two years from now. It could revolutionize research into a treatment. Alzheimer's is the most common type of dementia, which is a disease that cost the world approximately $604 billion every year. Forty million people are affected by the fatal disease worldwide and the number is expected to triple in 2050.
For the research, scientists looked for blood differences among 452 healthy people, 476 people with Alzheimer's disease and 220 people with mild cognitive impairment. They studied 26 proteins that were previously linked to Alzheimer's and found that 16 proteins were linked with the shrinking of the brain in Alzheimer's or mild cognitive impairment. With 87 percent accuracy, mild cognitive impairment patients are expected to develop Alzheimer's in the following year. Larger investigations with 5,000 to 10,000 subjects are still needed to understand the study better.
