Blood Test Appears Promising In Diagnosing Alzheimer’s Disease Before Onset Of Symptoms

A new exploratory blood test is showing “high accuracy” in screening for Alzheimer’s disease markers before the onset of symptoms. The blood test looks for a protein called phosphorylated tau or p-tau21, a key biomarker of Alzheimer's disease which increases at the same time as other damaging proteins (beta amyloid [Aβ] and tau) build up in the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease. Overall, the p-tau21 blood test results had high accuracy in identifying elevated Aβ (96%) and tau (97%) across all study subjects.

These findings were reported in “Diagnostic Accuracy of a Plasma Phosphorylated . . .