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, we need 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, we test the diagnostic and prognostic value 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. 

We found changes in plasma amyloid-β 1-42/1-40, p-tau181 and GFAP levels to be present already in very early stages of AD development and that longitudinal change in plasma p-tau181 and GFAP reflect disease progression in this preclinical stage.  Further, plasma GFAP levels were able to predict future cortical atrophy and memory decline in cognitively unimpaired individuals. Thereby, these blood- biomarkers, have great potential as early AD pathology pre-screening tools in the normal aging population which can be of great benefit for the enrolment of high-risk subjects in behavioural and pharmacological secondary, or even primary, prevention trials, and for disease and treatment-effect monitoring in the early stages of AD development. 

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