Study: Blood Test Can Predict Alzheimer's Disease

Researchers have developed a blood test that is astonishingly accurate at predicting a healthy individual's likelihood of developing Alzheimer's disease.

During the study, the researchers tested the blood of hundreds of healthy people for lipids, a byproduct of DNA and RNA. Five years into the study, 28 of the people they tested had developed Alzheimer's. The researchers examined the lipids of these 28 seniors and found that they had low levels of 10 particular lipids when compared with healthy seniors. To confirm their findings, they then looked at the blood of 54 other people who had Alzheimer's or mild cognitive impairment and found that those individuals also had low levels of the lipids in question.

The test was able to catch Alzheimer's disease before the individual was exhibiting any symptoms, suggesting that the disease begins to develop long before people's memories begin to fail. The lead researcher suggested that perhaps lipid levels start decreasing at the same time that brain cells start dying.

Although a great deal of work still needs to be done, the developers hope the test will one day be available in doctors' offices and replace current testing methods that are often expensive, unreliable, impractical and sometimes risks, such as PET scans and spinal taps. It will likely be quite a while before the test finds its way to physicians as it still needs to be validated by other labs and with larger groups of people.

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