SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS RADIO) – New technology developed at UCSF and Eli Lilly could soon lead to a blood test for Alzheimer’s disease – the most common type of dementia, affecting more than 6 million Americans.
How could this test change the way that doctors screen for Alzheimer’s, and how it is treated? Dr. Gil Rabinovici, a neurologist with the UCSF Memory and Aging Center, joined KCBS Radio’s Alice Wertz to discuss it on “As Prescribed.”
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“When I say Alzheimer’s disease, what I mean are very specific biological changes that occur in the brain,” said Rabinovici, who serves as Director of the UCSF Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. “There are proteins called plaques and tangles… basically toxic proteins that, deposited in the brain, interfere with the functioning of brain cells and ultimately... lead to people losing brain tissue.”
He explained that, for many years, the only way doctors could determine if a patient had Alzheimer’s was to look at their brain under a microscope and see if these toxic proteins were present.
“During life, we might suspect that someone has the disease if they develop progressive memory loss, especially in older age,” Rabinovici said. “But there was no way to know that for sure.”
Recent developments have helped health care professionals tackle this problem. New techniques include brain imaging and measuring spinal fluid levels. Blood testing is the latest diagnostic frontier for Alzheimer’s researchers.
“Just a simple blood draw can tell us whether people have plaques and tangles developing in their brain,” said Rabinovici. “And what’s really interesting is that we can detect these plaques and tangles, not only at the point where people have memory loss or dementia, but we can actually detect them probably 20 years or longer before people develop even the earliest signs of memory loss.”
This process involves detecting proteins in blood samples, he explained. For around five years, USCF has been working with pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly to develop the technology.
“We’ve been able to show that in people who have plaques and tangles in the brain, the levels of this tau protein are elevated compared to people who don’t have plaques and tangles,” Rabinovici said. “And the accuracy of the test is very high.”
Right now, researchers are working to test “the validity of the blood test in more diverse populations,” he added.
“Unfortunately, like a lot of medical research, the initial studies on this blood test have primarily been performed in non-Hispanic white and research participants. And what we’re doing now at UCSF and at many other centers is making a huge drive to make our research more open and accessible to minoritized populations and to make sure that the blood test is valid in the more diverse group of older Americans,” Rabinovici said.
Although it may be difficult for patients to face an Alzheimer’s diagnosis, he said “it really changes the compass from searching for a diagnosis to thinking about a treatment plan.”
Today, treatment options for the disease are more robust than ever once patients have a diagnosis – from lifestyle modifications to new medications like the Leqembi treatment recently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
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