The diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease has held a prominent position in U.S. news this month. For starters, scientists at UC Irvine reported an important discovery related to memory retrieval (or the lack thereof) in Alzheimer’s patients. Secondly, the Alzheimer’s Association and the National Institute on Aging held a conference call to clarify their position on their new proposed guidelines for Alzheimer’s diagnosis. And finally, a study published in the Archives of Neurology journal points to a spinal-fluid test for certain telltale proteins as being very highly accurate for identifying patients who are likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease.
The UC Irvine researchers have found a pathway to the brain that contains nerve fibers that move memories from where they are originally made to where they are stored. In Alzheimer’s patients, that pathway degenerates quickly, making it much more difficult (and eventually nearly impossible) for the brain to access stored memories. In a nutshell, the memories are there, but the way to them has broken down. The hope, of course, is that this discovery could lead to earlier diagnosis and more-effective treatments.
In a closely related story, the Alzheimer’s Association and the National Institute on Aging have drawn up recommendations for updating diagnostic criteria for the disease. Proposed criteria for diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease dementia, mild cognitive impairment due to Alzheimer’s, and preclinical Alzheimer’s are available online for viewing and comment. (The period for comment from the science community and other stakeholders closes on August 31.) The conference call held on August 4 provided the two organizations an opportunity to explain their advocacy of using brain scans and cerebrospinal fluid tests to check biomarkers in patients, The New York Times reported, and to make the point that these biomarkers---while they seem to hold great promise---will be used, for now, for research purposes only, with some patients in studies being tested to see how well the biomarkers predict disease.
Those biomarkers, the proteins amyloid and tau, measurable in a test of spinal fluid, can be highly accurate in predicting people who are “on their way to developing Alzheimer’s disease,” reports Southern California Public Radio (SCPR), citing a new study published earlier this week in the Archives of Neurology. The study measured amyloid and tau levels in patients’ spinal fluid and detected an “abnormal pattern present” in 90% of people who showed symptoms of the disease, according to SCPR.
These developments hold some long-overdue potential breakthroughs for the fields of Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis and treatment, and much interest for the IVD industry as well. And most significantly, this rash of good news is encouraging to those among us who know first- and second-hand the suffering and devastation this disease can wreak on families and communities.