A possible step forward for Alzheimer’s diagnostics

As the drug industry flails in its efforts to develop new Alzheimer’s treatments, scientists have struggled on a related front: coming up with blood tests to either diagnose the disease in asymptomatic patients or predict which healthy people will develop it.

But yesterday brought a sliver of good news: Researchers said that blood levels of 10 proteins did a decent job of identifying patients who had high enough brain levels of beta-amyloid, a marker of the disease, to be classified as having preclinical Alzheimer’s.

The hope is that the findings could give drug companies a desperately needed tool to identify patients for clinical trials.

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