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Promising Blood Test for Alzheimer's
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun Oct 14, 2007 04:59 PM
from the results-look-good-i-forget-why dept.
from the results-look-good-i-forget-why dept.
The online edition of the British journal Nature Medicine has a study of a blood test for Alzheimer's disease, developed at Stanford. The test lights up if 18 specific molecules are present in a blood sample. Using samples of stored blood, the test proved 90% accurate in identifying people who had been diagnosed with the disease by other methods. It was also 87% accurate in distinguishing samples from people who do not have Alzheimer's but exhibit some other form of dementia. The numbers of samples involved were small — SFGate's writeup has some details. The Mercury News's article says the test's developers want to begin selling it to laboratories in 2008, for which FDA approval would not be required. They hope to get FDA approval for general use by 2009.
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Great, but ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Great, but ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Great, but ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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I did cry when I thought about her as she was and I think she would have appro
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If you know what is causing it you can treat it accordingly and/or prepare for its progress.
If you find yourself or a loved one suffering from dementia, it will help your planning to get diagnosed.
Re:Great, but ... (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, there are treatments available to at least delay Alzheimer's disease. They're in the same situation as AIDs medications a decade ago - not much good for reversing the disease, but capable of delaying or stopping it's progress for years.
Give it another decade and we might even be able to reverse it's progress - memories not retained will still be lost, but the functionality, and maybe some past memory, be restored.
I don't know about you, but at this time I'd much rather know, so I could get on the drugs now. It's especially critical for me - I have a family history of Alzheimer's.
Maybe they'll find a cure before it gets bad. Maybe I'll die of something else. But the drugs, especially given early, can delay the disease by decades.
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That's correct, there are a couple. They don't work very well at all - likely for several reasons. One of them being that Alzheimer's dementia is hard to differentiate from the other dementias and hard to diagnose early given the background of age-related mental decline.
A good test - blood or imaging - or more likely a couple of half way decent tests with reasonable sensitivity and specificity would go a long way to helping
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- Starting the drug regime early is critical for effectiveness.
It's like the drugs slow/stop the acceleration of the disease, not the rate - If you're losing 1% of your memory a year*, you'll continue to lose that under the drugs - but it won't increase, hopefully, to 10%.
If they can catch it when that's still
A good test - blood or imaging - or more likely a couple of half way decent tests with reason
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My family has a long history, on my Father's side, of dementia setting in during the 60's -- so my Father and I both read all the news we can regarding such things.
In fact, my Father was mentioning a University study today of a herb that not only has been shown in controlled trials to treat the effects of AD but to also r
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The ultimate benefit (Score:2, Interesting)
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What the article fails to point out is the real benefit to getting early diagnosis for Alzheimer's. If people could be diagnosed earlier, they could get better care and avoid accidents.
Unfortunately there's no meaningful treatment for Alzheimer's. The FDA-approved drugs will make the difference between a patient being able to name 5 vegetables in a neurological test with the drug and 4 vegetables without the drug. That's what we mean by statistically significant but not clinically significant.
If you have someone who can't find his way home or is forgetting to turn off the burners on the stove, that person needs to go in some kind of supervised living regardless of what the diagnosis is,
I love it... (Score:5, Funny)
It pisses him off...
Lighten up (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: Lighten up (Score:2)
I must repeat what the last poster said: "Lighten Up!". Don't be so so selfish.
The best thing... (Score:3, Funny)
(sadly, the same cannot be said about the goatse comments)
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The value of the test (Score:5, Insightful)
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My own mother was eighty and growing a bit frail physically, but she still had all her intelligence and mental capacity. She was the target of a "home invasion" type robbery in which she received repeated blows to the head and face. Within a few short weeks she had become far advanced in dementia, and she was battling extreme anger and depression in the bargain. That was three years ago, and it's an endless struggle not to h
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Big whoop. (Score:5, Informative)
It doesn't matter.
Dementia has lots of possible causes, and there's really no way to tell most of them apart from just seeing the symptoms. That means that a dementia screening is required, and when done by an appropriate specialist (usually a neurologist, neuropsychiatrist, or geriatric psychiatrist), it's roughly 90% accurate, PLUS you have either ruled out or discovered other more easily identifiable and sometimes reversible causes of dementia, which is important for what should be obvious reasons. That is why none of these tests have replaced the standard screening, although the companies that have produced them have spent millions trying to market them as suitable replacements. The accepted diagnostic standards [nih.gov] haven't changed much in 20 years, really, the link given is still the gold standard or still a large part of the basis for more current standards for specialists or generalists.
The only big revolution is that some progress is being made on the metabolic processes that cause the plaques and tangles to appear in the brain, which might allow for preventative treatment, but it would probably need to begin in your 20's. Elan Pharmaceuticals was working on an antibody that could clear plaques from the brain, but it was unclear how much this would help those who were already suffering from AD, as brain cells will eventually start dying, although if this approach proves successful the disease may certainly be stopped and the damage kept from progressing, but it can't reverse existing damage.
And yes, this is my field. Here's some recommended [nih.gov] reading [nih.gov] for those looking for more info.
congratulations, Sherlock (Score:3, Interesting)
But what credit is there to that? Many were the claims to transmute lead into gold. What proved impossible by chemical means was by no means impossible within the framework of the right technology. I think you need to study the "Four Colour Corollary". This theorem states that the truth or falsity of the theorem is entirely independent of the number of bozos who publish unfounded and incorrect speculations
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1. It may be able to give diagnosis earlier.
2. It may be cheaper and faster than current screening.
3. When combined with current techniques it may add a few percentages to diagnostic precision. If it is cheap, it will be worth it for that alone.
From my perspective, #1 is key. We need to find the cause of Alzheimer's and many people (including myself) think that plaques are
A potential cure may be around the corner (Score:2)
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Disclaimer: I am an investor in Elan.
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New slogan (Score:2)
test allows for self termination (Score:2)
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Either way, I'd want to know.
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Its not untreatable (Score:5, Informative)
Its not untreatable, and there are a lot of promising new therapies coming online.
However, right here and now, if you know you are going to get the disease in the future, you can:
And cholinesterase blocker drugs will improve cognition in the face of a falling neuron count - improving function although not modifying the disease itself.
Whilst there are many ethical questions to screening tests for diseases you cannot treat, alzheimers does not fit into that category. We all die of something. Its all about getting the most quality time on the planet. Having a test for this would be a good thing.
Please also note that there are already tests that can identify risk of alzheimers, such as for the ApoE epsilon 4 genotype, so the concept of a screening test that helps separate types of demetia already exists.
For a concise reference, see Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
Michael
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Re:Lies, Damned Lies and... (Score:4, Funny)
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That quote doesn't describe the false positive rate. It describes the number of cases of non-Alzheimer's dementia that their test correctly doesn't call Alzheimer's. The false positive rate would indicate the number of participants without Alzheimer's (including this group of 39) who incorrectly test as having Alzheimers.
Also, remember that their test is also designed to detect people at risk of developing AD years in the future, so, as is also pointed out in t
Re:Politicians (Score:5, Interesting)
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Cancer, on the other hand, has no effect on day-to-day work until it becomes a life threat, and if caught early it's just some time off.
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Don't worry, we already have one of these in office in the US.
How about being denied a job for which the given ailment would prevent you from doing the job? That would be the point of having mental-related standards for people in office, so that they could do their job (and not the one of pandering to the
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Re:Politicians (Score:4, Insightful)
Can we require candidates for public office to take the test?
More to the point - can your medical insurer make you take it.
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Can we require candidates for public office to take the test?
how can you expect your leaders to protect your privacy if you require them not to care about theirs?
Anyone willing to run for public office under these conditions is by definition someone who does not mind such mandatory tests for a job or insurance.
In fact, I think this is the major reason politicans do so little to protect privacy: they do not have much of their own left.
If someone minds having their every move observed, with every embarassing thing made public, they will not run for public office.
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Who cares about this, all it can do is tell you you might have a disease that we can't cure. At most it would just make the person more depressed into thinking he/she actualy has the disease.
One of the most important benefits of this research is that they've managed to identify some biological changes that occur before clinical symptoms. That means they can start to identify the processes leading to the disease, which might lead to treatments. If this is real then it's a huge step in understanding Alz
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This is a step in the right direction.
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Re:FDA Approval? (Score:4, Informative)
However, the FDA does not regulate: Advertsising, Alcohol (woot), Consumer Products, Heatlh Insurance, Drugs of Abuse, Meat and Poultry (USDA), Pesticides, Restaurants, and Water
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"Drug" here is a misnomer (Score:2)