ALZHEIMER’S RESEARCH RIGHT NOW! #11: NEW Biomarkers Discovered THAT CAN ACCURATELY PREDICT ALZHEIMER’S (Possibly Up To) EIGHT YEARS BEFORE ONSET!!!!!

From the first moment I discovered my dad had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, it seemed like I was alone in this ugly place. Even ones who had loved ones suffering in this way; even though people TALKED about the disease, it felt for me like they did little more than mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I added a section to this blog… 

Every month, I’ll be highlighting Alzheimer’s research that is going on RIGHT NOW! Harvested from different websites, journals and podcasts, I’ll translate them into understandable English and share them with you. Today: A Tau-protein that helps DIAGNOSE Alzheimer’s!

It’s well understood today that finding amyloid plaques and tau tangles in the brain remains the gold standard for diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease. We can do that because we now have tools that are highly sensitive to the plaques and tangles that is done using a combination of taking a sample of a patient’s cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and doing a PET scan (like a CAT scan only aided by injection of a special fluid).

The big problem is that to get CSF, you have to puncture the SPINAL column with a huge needle. And while CAT scanners are pretty common things, a PET scanner is something else again – both expensive to buy and REALLY expensive to operate because the injection is radioactive and has to be “made” on site, so in order to DO a PET scan, you have to live in a rich country and live near a HUGE city…or get to one.

Right now, there are two main ways of figuring out if someone has Alzheimer’s – the PET scan and the spinal puncture. These are called “core AD biomarkers”, are widely used in both clinical and research settings.

The increases in a specific kind of a protein called “p-tau” – one of the “core AD biomarkers” – provides new insight into the biological and clinical development of Alzheimer's disease – BEFORE there are cognitive changes like increasing loss of memory and the other symptoms associated with Alzheimer’s Disease, sometimes as much as EIGHT YEARS BEFORE a person dies from the accumulating effects of AD.

But there’s been a new development! Where the old standard practice involved spinal taps and PET scans, doctors in Spain, France, and Slovenia have developed a test that is a SIMPLE BLOOD TEST! One of the participating doctors noted that “The practical challenge…is that…very tiny initial changes [in the amounts of p-tau] and are incredibly difficult to measure reliably. This compromises our chances to identify and recruit preclinical AD patients for clinical trials.”

An extended series of blood tests that look for increase in the p-tau molecule are conducted on people who MAY have a predisposition to Alzheimer’s – people like me who had a parents who was diagnosed with AD. Another participating doctor said, “A possible way to improve the chances of future therapies is to test them on people in the very early stages of the disease with elusive biological changes but lacking clinical symptoms including memory failings.”

While the treatment is NOT AVAILABLE yet, and this is NOT a cure, but rather a way to detect early signs of Alzheimer’s, it’s a long step forward in the fight to make Alzheimer’s “one more condition” to treat long before it gets out of control.

Resources: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/12/201201203937.htm
(the original study: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00401-020-02195-x)
Image: https://www.meduniwien.ac.at/web/fileadmin/_processed_/e/1/csm_shutterstock_142671010_4683b6bf13.jpg