Alzheimer's blood test development
OCTOBER 31, 2006
Lead researcher Professor Simon Lovestone, Old Age Psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry's paper on the link between proteins in the blood as indicators of an increased risk of Alzheimer's disease has been published in the journal Brain. It is the first time markers for the development of Alzheimer's have been identified in blood.
The findings take researchers a step closer to knowing whether a blood test can be used to diagnose and measure progression of the disease. This five-year project based at the IoP and sponsored by the Alzheimer's Research Trust used a cutting-edge process known as proteomics to identify proteins increased in the blood of Alzheimer's paretients but not in a control group of healthy older people. Two of these proteins were confirmed as markers for the disease through blood tests carried on 500 Alzheimer's patients in the UK.