Cognitively healthy seniors with high levels of a biomarker called p-tau217 in their blood had a 38% greater chance of developing early signs of dementia over five years, a new study found. Over 10 years, the risk was 78% higher, although the data was not as strong.

“What this tells me is that we can really use p-tau217 blood tests in the future to be able to understand someone’s individual risk for cognitive impairment,” said lead study author Rachel Buckley, an associate professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School, writes CNN.

Traditionally, diagnosing Alzheimer’s required expensive and invasive procedures like PET scans or spinal cord pulses. However, blood tests that measure levels of phosphorylated tau 217, or p-tau217, “strongly predict” the build-up of sticky beta-amyloid plaques in the brain, Buckley said.

Amyloid plaques, which cause inflammation and impair communication between neurons, can build up in the brain decades before memory loss or cognitive decline — even when people are in their 30s and 40s. them.

As beta-amyloid levels rise in the brain, tangles of proteins called tau begin to accumulate inside brain cells, causing neurons to collapse and die. In some diseases such as frontal lobe dementia, which impairs executive function rather than memory, tangles can accumulate without the presence of amyloid.

Not everyone with high levels of amyloid will progress to dementia, just as the presence of tau in the brain does not dictate cognitive impairment later in life, Buckley said.

Blood tests need further study. additional

The study results, scheduled to be presented simultaneously Wednesday at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference and published in the journal JAMA, reanalyzed the results of six observational and clinical trials conducted in Australia, North America and Japan. Nearly 2,700 older adults with no symptoms of cognitive decline underwent PET brain scans and p-tau217 tests at the start of the studies and were followed for up to 21 years.

However, the research is still in its early stages and needs to be replicated in larger studies that include people from “all walks of life and with varying levels of disease,” Buckley said.

Source: prizrenpost