Spinal fluid test predicts Alzheimer's
Researchers report that a spinal fluid test can be 100 per cent accurate in identifying patients with significant memory loss who are on their way to developing Alzheimer's disease.
Researchers report that a spinal fluid test can be 100 per cent accurate in identifying patients with significant memory loss who are on their way to developing Alzheimer's disease.
Although there has been increasing evidence of the value of this and other tests in finding signs of Alzheimer's, the study shows how accurate they can be. The new result is one of a number of remarkable recent findings about Alzheimer's.
After decades when nothing much seemed to be happening, when this progressive brain disease seemed untreatable and when its diagnosis could be confirmed only at autopsy, the field has suddenly woken up.
Alzheimer's, medical experts now agree, starts a decade or more before people have symptoms. And by the time there are symptoms, it may be too late to save the brain.
So the hope is to find good ways to identify people who are getting the disease, and use those people as subjects in studies to see how long it takes for symptoms to occur and in studies of drugs that may slow or stop the disease.
Researchers are finding simple and accurate ways to detect Alzheimer's long before there are definite symptoms. In addition to spinal fluid tests they also have new PET scans of the brain that show the telltale amyloid plaques that are a unique feature of the disease.
And they are testing hundreds of new drugs that, they hope, might change the course of the relentless brain cell death that robs people of their memories and abilities to think and reason.
"This is what everyone is looking for, the bull's-eye of perfect predictive accuracy,"Dr. Steven DeKosky, dean of the University of Virginia medical school, who is not connected to the new research, said about the spinal tap study.
Dr. John Morris, a professor of neurology at Washington University, said the new study "establishes that there is a signature of Alzheimer's and that it means something. It is very powerful."