New test for Alzheimer's disease

You can accurately diagnose Alzheimer's disease by a drop of blood

Svetlana Maslova, Hi-tech+

The new test will help simplify the examination for patients with suspected Alzheimer's disease and diagnose risks at an early stage.

Early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease can significantly slow down the progression of an incurable disease, but the low accuracy and high cost of modern examination methods complicates the identification of new cases at early stages. To solve this problem, scientists from The Korean Institute of Advanced Technologies has developed a blood test and analyzer for the accurate diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease.

The article Clinically accurate diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease via multiplexed sensing of core biomarkers in human plasma is published in the journal Nature Communications – VM.

The test is performed on the patient's blood plasma and evaluates the levels of beta-amyloid 42, beta-amyloid 40, total and phosphorylated tau protein. As an analyzer, scientists have developed a highly sensitive biosensor based on carbon tubes.

A feature of the new biosensor is the tightly aligned carbon tubes, which improve the sensitivity of the test by 100 times compared to other biosensors based on carbon tubes.

Figure from the article by Kim et al. – VM.

The sensitivity of the test was 90%, and the average accuracy rate was almost 87%. The effectiveness of the new analysis was tested among patients with an already established diagnosis. In new studies, scientists intend to test the accuracy of the analysis among people with suspected Alzheimer's disease with mild cognitive impairment.

It is believed that every tenth person over the age of 65 suffers from Alzheimer's disease, so scientists are looking for alternative ways of simple diagnosis. One of such simple and non-invasive methods may be the visualization of the patient's retina, which will indicate the early stages of the disease.

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