The National Institute of Aging describes Alzheimer’s disease, which afflicts over 32 million people worldwide. as a brain disorder that slowly destroys memory and thinking skills and, eventually, the ability to carry out the simplest routine tasks.
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It’s a progressive disease, where dementia symptoms gradually worsen over several years. In its early stages, memory loss is mild, but with late-stage Alzheimer’s, individuals lose the ability to carry on a conversation and respond to their environment.
The most common early symptoms of Alzheimer’s is difficulty remembering newly learned information.
It is the most common cause of dementia, a general term for memory loss and other cognitive abilities, accounting for 60-80% of dementia cases.
In what could hasten the process of introducing an affordable and accessible way to diagnose patients with memory problems like Alzheimer’s and Dementia, a team of researchers have reported that a blood test is significantly more accurate than doctors’ interpretation by primary care doctors of cognitive tests and CT scans in signalling the condition.
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The New York Times has reported that the study of these researchers conducted in Sweden, and published in the journal JAMA, found that 90% of the times the blood test correctly identified whether patients with memory problems had Alzheimer’s.
The results, reportedly presented in the international conference of Alzheimer’s Association held in Philadelphia recently, is being considered a latest milestone in the quest for affordable and accessible ways to diagnose Alzheimer’s.
According to the NYT report, experts emphasized that blood tests should be used only for people with memory loss and other symptoms of cognitive decline, and not for people who are cognitively healthy to predict if they will develop Alzheimer’s.
The report quoting medical experts also said that blood tests should be performed only after administering tests that assess memory and thinking abilities and CT scans that seek alternative causes like strokes or brain tumours. And blood test results should be confirmed by one of the gold-standard methods: PET scans or spinal taps to measure a protein, amyloid, that accumulates and forms plaques in the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s, even though these are pretty expensive.
According to the report, the study included about 1,200 patients with mild memory problems. About 500 of them visited primary care physicians; the rest sought specialist care at memory clinics. Dr Sebastian Palmqvist, an associate professor of neurology at Lund University who led the study with its senior author Dr Oskar Hansson, a professor of clinical memory research at the same university, said that first, about 300 patients in each group were given the blood test, and results were compared with the spinal taps or PET scans.
Then the researchers wanted to see how the blood test compared with the judgment of doctors after they administered cognitive tests and CT scans, the NYT report added.
