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Blood test indicates risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease

No. 24 | 06/04/2018 | by Koh

A newly developed blood test may indicate Alzheimer's disease on average eight years before the clinical diagnosis. This was demonstrated by scientists from the Ruhr University Bochum (RUB), the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and the Saarland Cancer Registry with a large population-based cohort study from the Saarland.
Joint press release of Ruhr University Bochum and German Cancer Research Center

Pathological deposits of amyloid-beta in the brain of people with Alzheimer's disease can be visualized using amyloid-PET (right). Healthy and pathologically folded amyloid beta proteins absorb infrared light differently. In Alzheimer's patients, there is a frequency shift below the threshold level compared to healthy subjects. This is detected by the new blood test.
© K. Gerwert, A. Nabers / RUB

There is as yet no cure for Alzheimer's disease. It is often argued that progress in drug research has been hampered by the fact that the disease can only be diagnosed when it is too late for an effective intervention. Alzheimer's disease is thought to begin long before patients show typical symptoms like memory loss. Scientists have now developed a blood test for Alzheimer's disease and found that it can detect early indicators of the disease long before the first symptoms appear in patients. The blood test would thus offer an opportunity to identify those at risk and may thereby open the door to new avenues in drug discovery.

One of the hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease is the accumulation of amyloid-β plaques in the patient's brain. The blood test, developed by Klaus Gerwert and his colleagues at the Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, works by measuring the relative amounts of a pathological and a healthy form of amyloid-β in the blood. The pathological form is a misfolded version of this molecule and known to initiate the formation of toxic plaques in the brain. Toxic amyloid-β molecules start accumulating in the patients' body 15-20 years before disease onset. In the present study, Gerwert and colleagues addressed whether the blood test would be able to pick up indications of pathological amyloid-β in very early phases of the disease.

The researchers first focused on patients in the early -so called prodromal- stages of the disease from the Swedish BioFINDER cohort. They found that the test reliably detected amyloid-β alterations in the blood of participants with mild cognitive impairment that also showed abnormal amyloid deposits in brain scans by PET imaging.

In a next step, the scientists investigated if their assay was able to detect blood changes well ahead of disease onset. They used data from ESTHER, a cohort study in Saarland Germany, led by Hermann Brenner (DKFZ) and conducted in collaboration with the Saarland Cancer Registry. The researchers compared blood samples of 65 participants that were later diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease with 809 controls. The assay was able to detect signs of the disease on average eight years before diagnosis in individuals without clinical symptoms. It correctly identified those with the disease in almost 70% of the cases, while about 9% of true negative subjects would wrongly be detected as positive.

Currently available diagnostic tools for Alzheimer's disease either involve expensive positron emission tomography (PET) brain scans, or analyze samples of cerebrospinal fluid that are extracted via lumbar puncture. The researchers suggest that their blood test serves as a cheap and simple option to pre-select individuals from the general population for further testing by these more invasive and costly methods to exclude the falsely positive subjects.

The blood test developed by Gerwert and colleagues uses a technology called immuno-infrared sensor to measure distribution of pathological and healthy structures of amyloid-β. The pathological amyloid-β structure is rich in a sticky, sheet-like folding pattern that makes it prone to aggregation, while the healthy structure is not. The two structures absorb infrared light at a different frequency, allowing the blood test to determine the ratio of healthy to pathological amyloid-β in the sample.

Andreas Nabers, Laura Perna, Julia Lange, Ute Mons, Jonas Schartner, Jörn Güldenhaupt, Kai-Uwe Saum, Shorena Janelidze, Bernd Holleczek, Dan Rujescu, Oskar Hansson, Klaus Gerwert, Hermann Brenner.: Amyloid blood biomarker detects Alzheimer's disease.
EMBO Molecular Medicine, 2018, DOI: 10.15252/emmm.201708763

With more than 3,000 employees, the German Cancer Research Center (Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, DKFZ) is Germany’s largest biomedical research institute. DKFZ scientists identify cancer risk factors, investigate how cancer progresses and develop new cancer prevention strategies. They are also developing new methods to diagnose tumors more precisely and treat cancer patients more successfully. The DKFZ's Cancer Information Service (KID) provides patients, interested citizens and experts with individual answers to questions relating to cancer.

To transfer promising approaches from cancer research to the clinic and thus improve the prognosis of cancer patients, the DKFZ cooperates with excellent research institutions and university hospitals throughout Germany:

  • National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT, 6 sites)
  • German Cancer Consortium (DKTK, 8 sites)
  • Hopp Children's Cancer Center (KiTZ) Heidelberg
  • Helmholtz Institute for Translational Oncology (HI-TRON Mainz) - A Helmholtz Institute of the DKFZ
  • DKFZ-Hector Cancer Institute at the University Medical Center Mannheim
  • National Cancer Prevention Center (jointly with German Cancer Aid)
The DKFZ is 90 percent financed by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and 10 percent by the state of Baden-Württemberg. The DKFZ is a member of the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centers.

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