Neuroscientists has developed a test that can detect Alzheimer's disease neurodegenration in a blood sample, according to MedicalXpress.
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Student nurse Elia (R) conducts a blood test on a patient in the emergency department of the Quatres villes hospital in Saint-Cloud, west of Paris, on July 20, 2022. - In a suburb of Paris not spared by the shortage of caregivers, a small emergency service tries to compensate for the closures of its neighbours at the cost of repeated sacrifices for the crew, AFP reports.
The Biomarker
BD-Tau or Brain-Derived tau, is said to be better than current blood diagnostic tests used to detect Alzheimer's-related neurodegeneration clinically.
Currently, diagnosing Alzheimer's need neuroimaging, which can be expensive and take a long time to schedule. Aside from that, there are many patients that don't have access to MRI and PET scanners.
Also, clinicians use 2011 guidelines set by the National Institute on Aging and the Alzheimer's Association to diagnose the disease. The AT(N) Framework required detection of three distinct components of Alzheimer's pathology, which are amyloid plaques, tau tangles, and neurodegeneration in the brain. These are all detected by imaging or through CSF samples analysis.
As mentioned, these tests have limitations, which is why there is a need for a more convenient and reliable AT(N) biomarkers in blood samples. With the development of simple tools that can detect the signs of Alzheimer's can be groundbreaking.
It should also be noted that although the detection of abnormalities in the blood and tau are accurate via the current methods today, the biggest challenge is detecting markers of neurodegeneration in the brain.
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The BD-Tau
Luckily, the BD-tau is here that can selectively detect brain degeneration while avoiding big tau proteins produced by cells outside the brain.
The scientists designed a special antibody that selectively binds to BD-tau, which makes it easily detectible in the blood. They validated this across over 600 patient samples from five independent cohorts. It showed that the levels of BD-tau detected in blood samples of Alzheimer's disease patients using the new assay matched with the levels of tau in the CSF.
The scientists are also hopeful that monitoring blood levels of BD-tau can improve their clinical trial design and help in screening and enrollment of patients.
They are also planning to perform a large-scale clinical validation of blood BD-tau in a wide range of research groups. It will also include older adults with no evidence of Alzheimer's disease, as well as the ones who are at different stages of the disease.
However, there is still considerable work to do to validate BD-tau as a biomarker for Alzheimer's disease.
Current methods of diagnosing Alzheimer's disease can be invasive and expensive. So, it is good to know there are other options for accurate diagnostic tests. The BD-tau can be a reliable tool that can quickly tell us if someone has Alzheimer's disease. However, we need more clinical trials to determine BD-tau's validity to be used in the clinic. If positive, it could open the door to many developments of other non-invasive diagnostic tests.
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