Media reports this week have highlighted new research into a possible blood test for Alzheimer’s, which may be able to detect the disease up to 10 years before symptoms appear.
Dr Laura Phipps of Alzheimer’s Research UK, the UK’s leading dementia research charity, said:
“Finding molecular signatures of early Alzheimer’s in blood is an active research area which holds potential for increasing the accuracy of diagnosis and improving clinical trials for new treatments. It’s promising to see new approaches emerging and being discussed that could improve how we can study diseases like Alzheimer’s.
“These findings suggest that molecular markers of insulin resistance in blood could be used to detect Alzheimer’s, potentially even before symptoms appear, but the research is at an early stage of development. This small study highlights insulin resistance as an important avenue for further research into Alzheimer’s, but the approach will need scaling up and testing in larger groups before we would know whether such a test could be used by doctors in the clinic.”
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