The marketing of a diagnostic kit for Alzheimer’s disease from a simple blood test has been authorized in Japan, its manufacturer announced on Thursday, a rare advance in the field of this very widespread neurodegenerative disease.
Japanese company Sysmex Corporation said in a statement that it now intends to launch its minimally invasive diagnostic tool on the Japanese market “as soon as possible”.
According to Sysmex, its system can measure in just over a quarter of an hour the level of accumulation in the blood of amyloid beta protein, one of the main biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease.
Other methods are already available to diagnose this pathology, but they are generally expensive or invasive (brain imaging, lumbar puncture to collect cerebrospinal fluid), while it is crucial to detect Alzheimer’s as early as possible in an attempt to to slow down its progress.
Other blood tests are in development elsewhere in the world or are awaiting marketing authorizations.
“There is an urgent need for simple, inexpensive, non-invasive and easily accessible diagnostic tools” to improve early detection of Alzheimer’s, underlines the American NGO Alzheimer’s Association on its website.
In the future, blood tests “will most likely revolutionize the process of diagnosing Alzheimer’s and all other dementias”, according to this NGO.
Alzheimer’s disease remains incurable to this day but in November additional clinical data confirmed the potential of a new drug, lecanemabto significantly slow the cognitive decline of patients followed for 18 months.
This medicine developed by the American pharmaceutical group Biogen and the Japanese Eisai (which is also a partner of Sysmex) also has sometimes severe adverse effects, but it has been widely hailed by the international scientific community as a very promising advance.
More than 55 million people worldwide suffer from dementia, a number that is expected to rise to 130 million by 2050 as life expectancy increases, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Alzheimer’s disease accounts for about 60 to 70% of cases.
Dementia is a major public health problem in Japan, the oldest country in the world (29.1% of its inhabitants were aged 65 and over in 2022, a new record).