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WASHINGTON: Alzheimer's disease can be predicted with up to 100% accuracy several years before its onset using biomarkers found in spinal fluids, a recent study has shown.
Geert De Meyer of Ghent University in Belgium and colleagues in the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative analysed data from 114 older adults who were cognitively normal, 200 who had mild cognitive impairment and 102 who had Alzheimer's disease for the study.
They identified a very specific biomarker signature that is present in more than 90% of the Alzheimer's group, 72% of those with mild cognitive impairment and 36% of those who were cognitively normal.
100% accuracy in tests
The results were cross-checked against two smaller data sets.
In one, 64 of 68 patients - or 94 percent of the group - were "correctly classified with the Alzheimer's disease feature," the authors of the study wrote in the American Medical Association's Archives of Neurology.
In another data set, made up of 57 patients with mild cognitive impairment who were followed up for five years, the model was 100% accurate in showing patients who progressed to Alzheimer's disease.
"The initiation of the Alzheimer's disease pathogenic process is typically unobserved and has been thought to precede the first symptoms by 10 years or more," the authors said.
Possibility of earlier detection
But the fact that the biomarkers were present in more than one-third of cognitively normal subjects suggested to the researchers that "Alzheimer's disease pathology is active and detectable earlier than has heretofore been envisioned."
Scientists have been searching "in earnest" for biochemical markers of Alzheimer's Disease in body fluids since the late 1990s, when a working group outlined the ideal biochemical markers for the disease, an editorial in the same issue of the Archives of Neurology said.
Among other things, biomarker tests should be more than 80% accurate for detecting Alzheimer's, technically reliable and reproducible, noninvasive, simple to perform and inexpensive.
