Scientists develop blood test to check for Alzheimer's

Researchers have developed a blood test for patients with thinking and memory problems to check if they have Alzheimer's disease and to see how far it has progressed.

- Nicola Davis

The team behind the work say the test could help medics decide which drugs would be most suitable for patients. For example, new drugs such as donanemab and lecanemab can help slow the progression of Alzheimer's, but only in people in the early stages of the disease.

"There is an urgent need for accurate and cost-effective Alzheimer's diagnostics considering that many countries have recently approved the clinical use of amyloid targeted therapies [such as donanemab and lecanemab]," said Prof Oskar Hansson from Lund University in Sweden, who is a co-author of the work.

Plaques of a protein called amyloid- and the formation of tangles of another protein called tau in the brain are considered hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease.

Writing in the journal Nature Medicine, Hansson and colleagues report how they found that fragments of tau, called eMTBR-tau243, can be detected in blood and correlate with a build-up of tau tangles in the brains of people with Alzheimer's, but not other diseases.