Stanford University scientists have developed a blood test to predict whether an individual will develop Alzheimer’s disease within two to six years.
Today, physicians use an exclusion process, such as the presence of stroke, alcoholism or tumors, to diagnose Alzheimer’s, which affects 5 million Americans. Often, that diagnosis cannot be confirmed until after a person dies.
Using blood samples from 259 patients from the U.S. and abroad, researchers found that a certain set of proteins communicate differently in people who ultimately develop Alzheimer’s. Clinical tests predicted the disease 90 percent of the time when compared with actual clinical diagnoses.
“Already we have people approaching us at meetings asking if they can give us a vial of their grandfather’s blood for testing,” said Markus Britschgi, one of the Stanford researchers.
