Misdiagnoses are not uncommon. A third of patients experience this when it comes to Alzheimer’s disease. This diagnostic error can be a hindrance to the administration of good treatment and/or good care of the patient. Until now, it was necessary to wait for the death of a patient to be able to establish with certainty the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, after examining the lesions in his brain. And during his lifetime, we could only evoke a probability of pathology and only at a late stage, from a certain threshold of severity of dementia, explains Inserm.
But since 2007 things have changed. An international group of neurologists, led by Bruno Dubois at Inserm, has reshuffled the cards of disease diagnosis by introducing new criteria such as biomarkers. They constitute real signatures of the pathology, present from the first symptoms, explains Inserm in a press release.
With these new criteria, “36% of their patients included in a therapeutic trial on the basis of old clinical criteria did not have Alzheimer’s disease”. The diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease is now based on “a single pair of clinical-biological criteria for all stages of the pathology”.
To put it simply, the diagnosis is based on an evocative clinical profile, which is invalidated or confirmed by a biomarker (abnormal level of brain proteins or high retention of the amyloid tracing).
This algorithm should benefit research. But it remains too expensive or invasive to be developed for all patients.
In France, between 750,000 people and one million suffer from Alzheimer’s disease. They should be 1.29 to 1.40 million patients in 2030.