Using artificial intelligence to analyze blood samples could predict the progression of a neurodegenerative disease, which develops over years. Doctors could then offer more appropriate treatments to their patients.
We talk about degenerative disease to characterize a medical disorder mainly affecting neurons. Parkinson, Alzheimer and Huntington are examples of neurodegenerative diseases. Incurable and disabling, they cause the progressive degeneration and death of nerve cells, leading to related problems with movement or mental functioning. Doctors find it all the more difficult to give effective and appropriate treatments to patients suffering from degenerative diseases since their progression differs according to each individual. However, according to a new study published in the journal Brain Tuesday, January 28, using artificial intelligence to analyze blood samples could predict the progression of the disease, which develops over several years.
In the past, studies of neurodegeneration have mostly used static or instantaneous data. The results were therefore limited in terms of finding slow disease progression. Here, scientists from the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital of McGill University (Canada) and the Ludmer Center for Neuroinformatics (Canada) wanted to uncover chronological information about the course of the disorder.
They then used an artificial intelligence algorithm to study post-mortem blood and brain samples from 1,969 patients with Alzheimer’s disease and Huntington’s disease. Thanks to the machine, they were able to identify how the genes of the patients had been expressed and modified over the decades, a first.
“Better determine the influence of experimental drugs”
The AI also managed to detect in the blood test 85-90% of the main predictive molecular pathways that the test of post-mortem brain data had shown.
“This test could one day be used by doctors to assess patients and prescribe therapies tailored to their needs. It could also be used in clinical trials to categorize patients and better determine the influence of experimental drugs on predicted disease progression,” enthuses Yasser Iturria-Medina, lead author of the study. Researchers are now preparing to test these models in other diseases such as Parkinson’s and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
A five-year French plan to fight against neurodegenerative diseases
In France, more than 850,000 people are affected by Alzheimer’s or a related disease. More than 200,000 patients have Parkinson’s and more than 100,000 people with multiple sclerosis.
In 2014, in order to better combat these disorders, the government has unveiled a “Five-year plan for neurodegenerative diseases” based on four axes. The first concerned the care and support of patients throughout life throughout the territory. The second focused on the adaptation of society to the challenges of neurodegenerative diseases in order to act on the daily repercussions of these pathologies and the third on the development and coordination of research on neurodegenerative diseases. The last axis, meanwhile, consisted of trying to make this plan “a real tool for innovation in the management of public policies and health democracy”. The plan having been put in place in 2015, it is soon coming to an end.
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