Adapted from the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville
Mayo Clinic investigators have found that measuring amyloid proteins in the blood of the elderly can help predict who is at imminent risk of developing mild cognitive impairments and Alzheimer's disease (AD).
They say their findings, published in the March issue of the Archives of Neurology, is a positive step forward in the quest to develop a simple and inexpensive blood test to help identify people at risk for AD—much as measuring cholesterol identifies those at risk for heart disease.
This amyloid blood test is not yet ready for use, the researcher say, because ongoing studies are still defining its predictive powers, but they say the study suggests that such a test could be useful especially when used in conjunction with other risk factors such as apolipoprotein-E (APOE4) gene and increasing age.
"By itself, the test identified individuals who were three times more likely to develop cognitive impairment or Alzheimer's disease within three to five years," says the study's first author, Dr. Neill Graff-Radford, who heads the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center's Memory Disorder Clinic at Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, and who has led the work on the blood test. "But when APOE status is also considered, the combination of these factors is strongly predictive."
The study's senior author, Dr. Steven Younkin, a Mayo Clinic basic researcher in Jacksonville, added that an amyloid test will only become useful when preventive therapies are available. "Nobody will want to know if they will develop Alzheimer's disease unless there is therapy that will reduce that risk," he says. "So at the same time that we are perfecting this test, investigators here and at other institutions are developing such therapies.
Additional studies are underway with thousands of participants.
Alzheimer’s Disease Research, a program of the American Health Assistance Foundation is proud to have previously funded Dr. Younkin.