A team of researchers from King College London (UK), led by Oxford University professor Simon Lovestone, has identified a group of a total of 10 proteins in the blood that will serve to predict, with 87% of precision , the onset of Alzheimer's disease. The study has been published in the journal Alzheimer & Dementia .
The researchers used blood samples from 1,148 participants , 476 of them with Alzheimer's, 220 with cognitive impairment and the rest, 452 healthy people, as a control group.
Scientists analyzed 26 proteins from all blood samples, finding that 16 of them were closely linked to brain shrinkage and, especially 10 of them, were able to predict whether people with mild cognitive impairment could develop in a short space of time. time Alzheimer's disease .
A blood test, according to the researchers, could help identify future patients at an early stage when Alzheimer's is just beginning to affect the brain (many years before the first symptoms appear) in order to develop a more effective treatment, already that, in the last 15 years, more than 100 experimental drugs to treat Alzheimer's have failed tests.
