An Australian team from the University of Melbourne announced, in a study published on October 28 in the scientific journal Molecular Psychiatry, that it had developed a blood test to detect Alzheimer’s, with an accuracy of 91%.
It could, according to the researchers, detect the disease years before the first symptoms appear.
Scientists have carried out genetic tests on 100 people of 80 years on average, and analyzed their micro-RNA, intermediaries between the DNA and the proteins of our body, present in the blood.
They then found that patients with Alzheimer’s disease, or likely to develop it, had a particular “genetic signature”, which differentiated them from the rest of the population.
One in five healthy people has tested positive for this “genetic signature”, which means that they are very likely to develop the disease.
Reassure and take charge more quickly
Carried out by brain imaging, additional studies of the brains of these at-risk patients revealed that they showed signs of cellular degeneration, suggesting a very early onset of Alzheimer’s disease.
According to Dr. Lesley Cheng, co-author of the study, the blood test carried out was able to predict the disease up to five years before the onset of the first symptoms and the definitive diagnosis.
If additional studies are required to validate these results, the researcher assured that this test was accurate to 91%, and could thus reassure the elderly worried by their memory loss.
People diagnosed as “at risk” could then be redirected to current screenings, which are more precise but also more invasive, based on brain imaging.
According to the authors, this test could prove effective for a early detection than that recently proposed by scientists at King’s College London, which had detected ten proteins in the blood. With 87% accuracy, the latter predicted the disease a year before symptoms occurred.
Currently, the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s primarily through tests neuropsychological on memory, speech or even locating in space, a search for symptoms that is only possible once the disease has actually been declared. If these earlier tests see the light of day, they will make it possible to fight against the disease even before it is visible …