Now, we have to wonder…

If they really have developed a blood test that can indicate if we are going to develop Alzheimer’s disease, do we want to take it?  After all, we have no method of curing Alzheimer’s- nor do we even have a process by which we can ameliorate the symptoms.  (Protein clumps appear in the brain some 20 years before folks manifest memory loss and/or confusion.  And, not all patients with amyloid clumps manifest Alzheimer’s.  But, really, PET- positron emission tomography, a brain scan- is the only foolproof method to scan for Alzheimer’s now.  And, a PET scan is very expensive- on the order of $ 5K.)

Of course, this test would make drug trial evaluation more scientific.  Because up to now, we provide drugs to folks for which we have no clue if they didn’t develop Alzheimer’s because they never would- or because the drug works!

The test (an assay of plasma β-amyloid (Aβ)42/Aβ40) via mass spectrometry was developed by Dr. Randall J Bateman, along with Drs. S Schindler, J Bollinger, V Ovod, K Mawuenyega, Y Li, B Gordon, D Holtzman, J Morris, T Benziner, C Xiong, and A Fagan, all of Washington University School of Medicine (St Louis, MO), as reported in Neurology.

And, don’t get too excited either way.  This new diagnostic (which discerns if amyloid deposits are found in the brain- which is a hallmark of Alzheimer’s, but it’s not exclusive to Alzheimer’s)  was only used in 158 folks over the age of 50.  These folks were not manifesting Alzheimer’s symptoms and underwent spinal taps plus brain scans.   And, the blood test results only matched brain scan data 88% of the time- which means the diagnostic has a very high failure rate. (Even when we combined the data from the blood test with examination of two other risk factors- the gene variant APOE3 and screened only those over the age of 65, the assay was still not perfect, only reaching a 94% agreement with the brain scans.)

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