Using current techniques, Alzheimer’s disease, can only be detected once the typical plaques have formed in the brain. At this point, therapy seems no longer possible.
However, the first changes caused by Alzheimer’s take place on the protein level up to 20 years sooner.
A two-tier method developed at can help detect the disease at a much earlier stage. The researchers from Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) published their report in the March 2019 edition of the journal Alzheimer’s and Dementia: Diagnosis, Assessment and Disease Monitoring.
Protein folding !
In Alzheimer’s patients, the amyloid beta protein folds incorrectly due to pathological changes long before the first symptoms occur. A team of researchers headed by Klaus Gerwert successfully diagnosed this misfolding using a simple blood test; as a result, the disease can be detected approximately eight years before the first clinical symptoms occur. The test wasn’t suitable for clinical applications however: it did detect 71 per cent of Alzheimer’s cases in symptomless stages, but at the same time provided false positive diagnoses for nine per cent of the study participants. In order to increase the number of correctly identified Alzheimer’s cases and to reduce the number of false positive diagnoses, the researchers poured a lot of time and effort into optimising the test.
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