Blood-biomarkers for early detection of Alzheimer’s Disease

The neurochemistry laboratory of the Amsterdam UMC together with ADx neurosciences and VU Amsterdam will test the potential use of blood-biomarkers for detecting Alzheimer’s disease (AD) pathology in cognitively normal elderly.

The number of AD patients (currently 40 million cases) is growing rapidly and is expected to reach 75 million people by 2030. To be able to stop this rapid progression and thereby reduce emotional burden and care costs, it is needed to develop treatment strategies that prevent people from developing AD. For this, precise and early diagnosis is relevant. AD pathology may present years before clinical disease diagnosis and can be accurately assessed through β-amyloid positron emission tomography (PET) imaging or cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) analysis. However, these procedures are costly and invasive and thereby less applicable for repetitive analysis or as pre-screening tool. Accurate blood-biomarkers may be a solution for this, since blood-collection is considered less invasive, it can be applied at large scale and is less expensive.

Here, the diagnostic and prognostic value is tested of a panel of newly, by our partners, developed blood-biomarkers for detecting early AD pathology, using longitudinally collected blood samples from cognitively healthy identical twin-pairs.

Results from this study will not have immediate application on a practical level but can set the stage for generating a validated commercially marketable blood-biomarker panel, with comparable clinical performance as CSF or PET imaging. Through the minimal invasive and cost-effective nature, blood-biomarkers may in the future be implemented on a broader scale as a pre-screener for enrolment of high-risk patients in prevention trials and monitoring of disease progression in these subjects, and thereby will provide clues for successful treatment strategies for AD prevention.

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