Tag : Neurodegeneration

Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania): A team of neuroscientists led by a University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine researcher developed a blood test to detect a new marker of Alzheimer's disease neurodegeneration. A study based on their findings was published in the journal Brain. The biomarker, called "brain-derived tau," or BD-tau, outperforms current blood diagnostic tests used to detect Alzheimer's-related neurodegeneration clinically. It is specific to Alzheimer's disease and correlates well with Alzheimer's neurodegeneration biomarkers in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). "At present, diagnosing Alzheimer's disease requires neuroimaging," said senior author Thomas Karikari, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychiatry at Pitt. "Those tests are expensive and take a long time to schedule, and a lot of patients, even in the U.S., don't have access to MRI and PET scanners. Accessibility is a major issue." Currently, to diagnose Alzheimer's disease, clinicians use guidelines set in 2011 by the National Institute on Aging and the Alzheimer's Association. The guidelines, called the AT(N) Framework, require detection of three distinct components of Alzheimer's pathology--the presence of amyloid plaques, tau tangles and neurodegeneration in the brain--either by imaging or by analyzing CSF samples. Unfortunately, both approaches suffer from economical and practical limitations, dictating the need for development of convenient and reliable AT(N) biomarkers in blood samples, collection of which is minimally invasive and requires fewer resources. The development of simple tools detecting signs of Alzheimer's in the blood without compromising on quality is an important step toward improved accessibility, said Karikari. "The most important utility of bloo ...