Alzheimer’s patients who were at earlier stages of the disease did better than those with more advanced cognitive decline [in clinical trials], says Colin Masters, a neuroscientist at Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health in Australia who was not involved in the trials. This indicates that the key to finding an effective treatment might be to catch subjects before their condition advances too far.
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Thanks to the recent development of new detection technologies that yield more-precise and reliable measurements of circulating proteins, RNAs, and other molecules, the field is hoping to do just that. Using these analytic tools, which weren’t available just a few years ago, multiple labs around the world are now searching for new biomarkers of the disease to develop blood tests that can screen for early signs of Alzheimer’s, differentiate it from conditions with similar symptoms, or track its progression.
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According to Henrik Zetterberg, a biomarkers researcher at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, improvements in the analysis of protein composition in blood samples have driven an explosion of research—and promising results—over the past decade.
Read full, original post: The Hunt for a Blood Test for Alzheimer’s Disease
