2024-03-29 09:16:31
With the arrival of new therapies, the problem of early diagnosis is gaining importance. A former winner of the France Alzheimer calls for projects is working on a new diagnostic tool based on a blood test and their recent results are promising.
Knowing how to detect Alzheimer’s disease earlier is crucial to treating the disease effectively. At the dawn of new therapeutic care aimed solely at people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease at an early stage, the need for effective and precise tools to diagnose these people becomes imperative.
The team of Dr Jérôme Braudeau, former winner of the France Alzheimer calls for projects, studied a new approach which uses blood tests to detect early signs of the disease. These researchers worked on blood samples from 345 people followed over a period of up to 13 years, as well as on their clinical data making it possible to classify these patients according to the presence or absence of cognitive disorders (Alzheimer’s individuals vs. non-Alzheimer). They were thus able to search for blood biomarkers that would allow them to accurately predict whether an individual will develop Alzheimer’s disease in the future.
How do they do it?
After several years of research, this team was able to select 19 blood biomarkers of interest and developed an algorithm capable of performing different calculations allowing them to predict whether a person will trigger Alzheimer’s disease with specificity (probability of being tested negative when you are not sick) of 93% and a sensitivity (possibility of testing positive when you are sick) of 65.4%.
The interest of this approach is even more important when it is coupled with the tools used in practice in the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease (lumbar puncture or PET scan) which would then make it possible to obtain a specificity of 100%, and would, in theory, eliminate the risk of being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease if you are not. This information is crucial for the future of Alzheimer’s disease management. This would reduce diagnostic wandering among people with cognitive disorders and make it possible to more effectively treat individuals likely to benefit from the new drugs soon to be available in Europe.
The next step in validating this process will be a larger-scale clinical study aimed at involving several people with the aim of finding the results of this study on a larger volume of individuals.
Sources:
Souchet, B., Michaïl, A., Heuillet, M. et al. Multiomics Blood-Based Biomarkers Predict Alzheimer’s Predementia with High Specificity in a Multicentric Cohort Study. J Prev Alzheimers Dis (2024).
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