Would you want to know if you have Alzheimer’s disease? It seems like most people would want to know definitively if they have Alzheimer’s. There is a test that is expensive and cumbersome. It involves being hooked up to an IV and being taken to a machine called a PET (positron emission tomography) scanner in order to scan the brain. There is also a test to detect biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease in spinal fluid. It requires a lumbar procedure which is no fun and also costs money.
Previously, the only way to tell with certainty if a loved one had Alzheimer’s was to do an autopsy on the brain after death. Today, a blood test may soon be available that detects Alzheimer’s. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and Lund University in Sweden have been able to show that a blood test is as good at identifying people in the early stages of Alzheimer’s as cerebrospinal fluid tests. The blood test may replace more expensive and invasive brain scans and spinal taps for detecting Alzheimer’s, according to researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
What’s great is that new drugs for Alzheimer’s are being developed and it’s important to get a diagnosis as early as possible. Also, in order to take drugs for Alzheimer’s, one will need a medical diagnosis for the disease and this can be achieved with the blood test.
Alzheimer’s disease was named after Dr. Alois Alzheimer. His patient, Auguste Deter had some strange symptoms in 1901 that could not be identified at the time. But after her death, Dr. Alzheimer did an autopsy of her brain. What he noticed were clumps of sticky plaques that we see today as well as tangled nerve cells. The outer layer of the brain was shrunken.
For more information about the Alzheimer’s blood test, please visit:
https://medicine.wustl.edu/news/alzheimers-blood-test-performs-as-well-as-fda-approved-spinal-fluid-tests/#:~:text=A%20subgroup%20analysis%20of%20healthy,symptoms%20as%20the%20 with%20 symptoms.