Detecting the Alzheimer’s with a simple blood test is getting closer. An international team of researchers has proven the usefulness of a blood biomarker, P-TAU217 protein, to detect the disease in 1,767 patients from Spain, Sweden and Italy.
Until now, the most used biomarkers to detect this disease, which affects approximately 60 million people worldwide, are obtained from the cerebrospinal fluid of patients through invasive and/or expensive techniques.
To move towards an equivalent and simpler diagnosis, scientists have been studying the presence in blood of various molecules that seem to serve as biomarkers, that is, they act as early warning signs, helping doctors to identify Alzheimer’s through a simple analysis.
In the study of these biomarkers, the work of scientists associated with several Spanish centers has been fundamental: the Hospital del Mar, the Barcelonabeta Brain Research Center (BBRC), the Research Center of the Pasqual Maragall Foundation, the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology (Bist).
After the exhaustive comparison of various biomarkers in plasma, the authors presented this Wednesday in the journal Nature Medicine their advances with the P-Tau217 protein, which bring us closer to a diagnosis of the most accessible and less invasive Alzheimer’s.
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Test Try the usefulness of a blood biomarker to diagnose the Alzheimer’s
The essay participated 1,767 patients from Spain, Sweden and Italy with cognitive symptoms typical of the disease. They were 73 years old, and 53% were women and 37% men.
In total, 1,219 analysis were carried out in specialized care centers and 548 in primary care using an automated platform already present in many centers: lumipulse.
The result has shown the usefulness of this blood biomarker to detect Alzheimer’s, and the effectiveness of using a large platform, such as the aforementioned, for use in primary care, which would allow a population screening of large -scale disease.
The results point to “the clinical utility of this marker and the ability to extend its use of specialized consultations towards less specialized consultations,” said Eloy Rodríguez, head of the Neurology Service of the Marqués de Valdecilla-Idival University Hospital, on a platform collected by Science Media Center.
This finding “will contribute to democratize the biological diagnosis of precision of Alzheimer’s disease, avoiding in many cases the need to make determinations of more invasive markers (lumbar puncture) or faces and less available (PET),” Rodriguez added.
With EFE information.
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