New Alzheimer’s test ‘90% accurate’
pharmafile | March 10, 2014 | News story | Research and Development, Sales and Marketing | Alzheimer's, US, mdi, washington dc
US researchers have developed a blood test which they say is able to predict with overwhelming accuracy if someone will develop Alzheimer’s disease (AD).
The research at Washington DC’s Georgetown University, published online in Nature Medicine, shows that a lipid panel can demonstrate whether a healthy person will develop mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or Alzheimer’s within three years.
“The lipid panel was able to distinguish with 90% percent accuracy these two distinct groups – cognitively normal participants who would progress to MCI or AD within two to three years, and those who would remain normal in the near future,” says Dr Howard Federoff, executive dean of Georgetown’s School of Medicine.
The panel highlights changes in the breakdown of neural cell membranes resulting in 10 identifiable lipids (metabolites) in the blood – and two of these have strong links to the neuropathology of Alzheimer’s.
There is currently no cure for Alzheimer’s and the test holds out the tantalising prospect of earlier treatment for the disease – which may prove more effective at slowing or preventing its onset.
The World Health Organisation predicts that incidence of Alzheimer’s will double every 20 years, from 35.6 million sufferers in 2010 to 115.4 million by 2050. The cost of treating dementia – an umbrella term for diseases of which Alzheimer’s is the most common – is an estimated 1% of the world’s GDP.
Yet while the news from Georgetown has excited great interest, scientists are likely to be cautious about prospects since all previous attempts at developing Alzhiemer’s drugs have failed.
Federoff makes the point that one reason for this may be that the treatments were evaluated too late in the disease process – which would make his team’s findings potentially very significant.
“We consider our results a major step toward the commercialisation of a pre-clinical disease biomarker test that could be useful for large-scale screening to identify at-risk individuals,” Federoff continues.
“We’re intending to design a clinical trial where we’ll use this panel to identify people at high risk for Alzheimer’s to test a therapeutic agent that might delay or prevent the emergence of the disease,” he concludes.
Governments have certainly become more publicly aware in the last year or so that dementia is a problem which needs tackling, with last December’s G8 summit devoted to the issue in a bid to foster global collaboration of the sort which led to advances in treating HIV and AIDS.
The Europe-wide Innovative Medicines Initiative is investing £44 million in clinical trials for Alzheimer’s drugs, and the European Commission is to put up £460 million and issue a call for proposals on research into neurodegenerative diseases.
Adam Hill
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