Scientists have created a radical blood test to detect Alzheimer’s disease. This blood test reportedly has an edge over other blood tests in the sphere.

Alzheimer’s is a neurodegenerative disease and is probably the most common type of dementia, but its diagnosis is a challenge, especially throughout the early onset of the disease.

For successful diagnosis, the detection of three distinct markers is really useful. These include inordinate accumulation of amyloid and tau proteins, in addition to slow and progressive lack of neuronal cells in specified regions of the brain.

Currently, Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis entails expensive brain imaging and painful lumbar puncture, as per The Guardian. Due to this fact, the necessity for a less complicated blood test diagnosis is clear.

Brain imaging shouldn’t be only expensive, but has a protracted waiting time for scheduling.

“A whole lot of patients, even within the US, don’t have access to MRI and PET scanners. Accessibility is a significant issue,” Prof Thomas Karikari on the University of Pittsburgh, in Pennsylvania, US, co-author of the study published within the journal Brain, said.

Lumbar puncture is a really painful procedure that’s used to extract cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) from the spinal cord. One may even exhibit headaches or backache following the procedure.

Besides being painless and available, blood tests can even assist in the early detection of the disease, which is able to, in turn, result in early initiation of treatment.

“A blood test is cheaper, safer, and easier to manage, and it might probably improve clinical confidence in diagnosing Alzheimer’s and choosing participants for clinical trial and disease monitoring,” Karikari said, the outlet reported.

Though current blood tests can detect abnormal levels of amyloid and tau proteins, spotting markers of nerve cell damage specific to the brain has proved to be difficult. That is where the blood test developed by Karikari and his team differs. The research team has developed an antibody-based blood test that detects a specific type of tau protein called brain-derived tau. This protein is particular to Alzheimer’s disease.

For the study, the researchers tested 600 patients affected by different stages of Alzheimer’s. They found that levels of brain-derived tau were commensurate with levels of tau within the CSF. Also, the blood test could tell Alzheimer’s aside from other neurodegenerative diseases.

Protein levels also showed a robust association with the severity of amyloid plaques and tau tangles in brain tissue taken from people dead resulting from Alzheimer’s, the study found.

Monitoring levels of brain-derived tau within the blood could help create efficient clinical trials for Alzheimer’s treatments, Karikari hoped.

A separate study has found rare, damaging genetic variants that increase the danger of Alzheimer’s disease.

“Our results provide additional evidence for a significant role for amyloid-β precursor protein processing, amyloid-β aggregation, lipid metabolism, and microglial function in AD,” the authors wrote of their paper.

Using gene-based burden evaluation instead of the more common genome-wide association studies (GWAS), the researchers found a robust link between rare, damaging variants in ATP8B4 and ABCA1 with AD risk, and a signal in ADAM10, in addition to rare-variant burden within the genes RIN3, CLU, ZCWPW1 and ACE, based on GenEngNews.