Scientists have made another major stride toward the long-sought goal of diagnosing Alzheimer¡¯s disease with a simple blood test. On Sunday, a team of researchers reported that a blood test was significantly more accurate than doctors¡¯ interpretation of cognitive tests and CT scans in signaling the condition.
The study, published Sunday in the journal JAMA, found that about 90% of the time the blood test correctly identified whether patients with memory problems had Alzheimer¡¯s. Dementia specialists using standard methods that did not include expensive PET scans or invasive spinal taps were accurate 73% of the time, while primary care doctors using those methods got it right only 61% of the time.
¡°Not too long ago measuring pathology in the brain of a living human was considered just impossible,¡± said Dr. Jason Karlawish, a co-director of the Penn Memory Center at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the research. ¡°This study adds to the revolution that has occurred in our ability to measure what¡¯s going on in the brain of living humans.¡±
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