90% accuracy! Nature breakthrough: blood test can "recognize"

For the past 15 years, scientists around the world have been looking for a simple blood test for dementia Recently, Nature magazine published a breakthrough: a team of scientists from Japan and Australia developed a blood test that can detect toxic proteins related to Alzheimer's disease, and the accuracy of the test is as high as 90%!
"So far, there is no reliable method to identify early dementia patients, so most clinical trials are to recruit people with obvious clinical symptoms At this time, brain damage related to β - amyloid has occurred, and it may be too late to reverse this damage "
"So far, all the candidate drugs that have been developed to prevent Alzheimer's have failed in clinical trials, and many pharmaceutical companies have abandoned this field," said Katsuhiko Yanagisawa, a molecular biologist and the corresponding author of the new results Scientists suspect that these failures may be a problem with the design of the trial, rather than the 'no' of the drug being tested "
In fact, two methods that can now be used to identify β - amyloid protein in the brain are to use positron emission tomography to image the brain, or directly determine the level of the protein in CSF from the spinal cord Although they are used to help recruit patients into recent clinical trials, these tests are expensive and uncomfortable   New method combined with two existing technologies
In this new study, Yanagisawa and his colleagues combined two existing techniques, immunoprecipitation and mass spectrometry, to measure fragment levels of "beta amyloid" and "larger proteins derived from it" in blood samples The results showed that in two independent cohorts (including 122 in Japan and 252 in Australia), the test results were consistent with those obtained by brain imaging and spinal fluid analysis   It is worth mentioning that in each cohort of the study, individuals between 60 and 90 years old were included, some were healthy, some had mild cognitive impairment, and some were Alzheimer's patients Reading Guide: scientists say that next, larger, longer-term studies are needed to confirm the accuracy of the test "used to identify high levels of beta amyloid in the human brain." They hope that drug developers will be able to use the test to recruit patients into clinical trials before irreversible brain damage occurs, so that the trials can be more reliable At the same time, they believe that the test has the advantage of being relatively simple and cheaper   Best results seen so far
For the research results, Simon lovestone, a neuroscientist at Oxford University, UK, said: "at first, the idea of measuring brain diseases in the blood seemed impractical, but now we are getting closer to success This paper provides the best results I have seen so far "
In a BBC report, Dr Abdul hye of King's College London also said: "this study is of great significance because it is the first time that a team has shown a strong association between plasma amyloid and brain and CSF."
In conclusion, the authors believe that this blood test is expected to achieve a broader clinical application and more effective population screening Ultimately, they hope that using this cheap and simple test will help develop better treatments for Alzheimer's.