“With breakthroughs in clinical research in recent years, there are many ways to prevent and delay the development of dementia,” said Yu Jintai. “But the problem is that AD patients usually only seek medical treatment and are diagnosed after obvious symptoms such as memory and cognition appear, and it may be too late at this time.”
Diagnosing AD is a relatively complex process, including a series of scale tests. Patients may have to undergo PET, MRI brain scans, or cerebrospinal fluid testing through spinal puncture. At the end of last year, the Alzheimer’s Association of the United States formulated a new draft guideline for the diagnosis and staging of AD, calling for a simpler method to diagnose AD.
ADVERTISEMENT
According to the “2022 China Alzheimer’s Disease Report”, there are about 15.07 million dementia patients in people aged 60 and above in China, of which 9.83 million are AD patients. The disease burden is becoming more and more serious, and the early diagnosis of AD, including blood tests, has also attracted more and more attention from the academic community. If a series of latest studies are confirmed and eventually widely adopted, AD diagnosis and treatment may enter a new era.
15-year early warning
“If we want to intervene effectively in the early stages of dementia, then we need to do this kind of work,” said Professor Amanda, a neuroscientist at University College London, in a media statement. The study was published in Nature Aging on February 12 this year. The main journal of Nature commented that the study “marks a step towards blood tests that can detect Alzheimer’s disease and other types of dementia in the early asymptomatic stages.” In order to reveal the clues of the onset of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) at an early stage, Yu Jintai’s team, in collaboration with the Institute of Brain-Inspired Intelligence Science and Technology of Fudan University and the University of Warwick in the UK, analyzed blood samples from 52,645 healthy participants collected from the UK Biobank between 2006 and 2010.
“Just like people can test cholesterol and uric acid in the blood to intervene in advance and avoid various diseases such as heart attacks and gout.” Yu Jintai said, “There are effective intervention methods for AD at present, but what is lacking is accurate marker screening that can be implemented on a large scale.”
Studies have shown that in an average follow-up of more than 14 years, 1,417 participants were diagnosed with new-onset all-cause dementia (ACD) and 691 patients were diagnosed with new-onset Alzheimer’s disease (AD).
Using AI algorithms, the team identified three plasma biomarkers highly associated with dementia among 1,463 proteins, namely GFAP (glial fibrillary acid protein), NEFL (neurofilament light chain protein) and GDF15 (growth/differentiation factor 15).
ADVERTISEMENT
