Alzheimer’s is a devastating disease that is undoubtedly a true ghost, since it only It becomes visible when the damage is already irreparable and that, despite trying to stop it, it is becoming difficult to control it. And historically, the medical diagnosis comes when memory begins to fail, but by then the brain has been suffering in silence for years, even decades. Now science focuses on the need for early diagnosis so that treatments can work.
A new analysis. One of the ways to detect this disease before it begins to show the classic symptoms such as memory loss is through a blood test. This is the milestone that has been collected in The Lancet magazine recently thanks to research from the University of California, and that could generate a large population screening that is not free of controversy.
What they did. The researchers followed 1,350 people aged between 56 and 69, without any type of dementia, for more than 35 years. And here the key was to look for specific proteins circulating in the blood that increased in the earliest phases of Alzheimer’s, as occurs with others marked in other diseases such as PSA in prostate cancer.
And they found two biomarkers. The first of them is Aβ42/40, which is an early indicator that warns of the accumulation of hateful beta-amyloid plaques in the brain. But they also found the protein p-tau217, which is considered today the most precise marker for the pathology.
The results. The 6% of participants who tested positive for these biomarkers showed a four-fold increased risk of developing verbal memory problems and a decline in their cognitive speed a decade later. But science has been trying to refine this tool for years, looking for markers such as GFAP, which rises about ten years before symptoms appear.
See the invisible. The blood test does not walk alone in this diagnostic revolution, since on the same day, The Lancet published a second study based on nearly 800 participants from the US and Canada that tests a new and sophisticated neuroimaging technology: the MK6240 PET plotter.
Until now, visualizing the tau protein, which is one of those responsible for Alzheimer’s by accumulating in neurons, was a great challenge. But this new tracer promises to be much more sensitive, detecting twice as many positive cases in healthy people with amyloid accumulation compared to the standard used today.
You have to wait. Before throwing the bells in the air, it should be noted that experts point out that this test not ready to be used as general population screening. The reason lies in mathematics, since the prevalence of asymptomatic Alzheimer’s in healthy middle-aged people remains low in absolute terms, so applying this test to everyone would generate a very high volume of false positives. That is, an increase in this protein that is not actually related to early Alzheimer’s.
But logically, the fear, anxiety and the resulting cascade of confirmatory tests would collapse the health services that are already stressed, and furthermore, the drugs we have, despite the fact that they stop the effects of the disease in its earliest phases, are not yet definitive. That is why we must remain on the right path, but there is still a long way to go to get this disease under control.
Images | Robina Weermeijer Testalize.me
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