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A new blood test may have the potential to transform Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis, patient care, early interventions and more targeted treatments, say researchers.
Researchers at Trinity College Dublin, the Tallaght Institute of Memory and Cognition and St James’s Hospital, Dublin are exploring the ability of a new blood test to detect Alzheimer’s Disease (AD).
This test could potentially replace the current diagnostic method, a lumbar puncture/spinal tap (which is invasive and poses risks and challenges) in over half of patients with early symptoms, thus allowing more patients to be diagnosed more accurately and with greater efficiency.
The study, published in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Diagnosis, Assessment and Disease Monitoring, is one of the first in Europe to examine the “real-world” performance of one of the leading automated blood tests for Alzheimer’s Disease, plasma p-tau217, in patients with mild symptoms undergoing assessment in a specialist memory service.
About 148 patients generously donated blood and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) samples, enabling researchers to directly compare new blood tests to established CSF biomarkers.
The study found that measuring plasma p-tau217 using a fully-automated system, was more than 90 per cent as accurate as results obtained from LP.
Integrating the blood test into clinical pathways could potentially avoid the need for over half of diagnostic LPs. This has clear implications for the diagnosis and management of early Alzheimer Disease.
From their results, the research team believe that this new blood test could replace over half of the 150-200 diagnostic LP procedures that they currently carry out in the Tallaght Institute of Memory and Cognition every year.
This blood test is not available currently in Ireland and the findings from this research will lend support to making it available in the future.
“This ‘translation’ from a research to a diagnostic test is dependent on the scientists, the clinical teams and the support from hospital management,” said Dr Jean Dunne, Chief Medical Scientist, Department of Immunology, St James’s Hospital and Trinity Translational Medicine Institute (TTMI).
Source - IANS
