Scientists might have discovered a cure for Alzheimer’s. Researcher’s from King’s College London and Oxford University have successfully identified ten proteins contained in people’s blood which can say whether a person is likely to develop disease or not. [wpsr_retweet]
The study, which was published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia journal, is seen as one of the biggest breakthroughs related to Alzheimer’s. It may help scientists to develop a blood test that would predict the onset of the disease. Until recently, doctors were able to diagnose a patient suffering from Alzheimer’s only when disease has progressed beyond its curable stage. That is because a person’s brain is attacked by the condition years before it can be identified. As a result, even though there are drugs for the disease, they are not effective.
With this new finding, researcher hope that they would be able to spot the earliest signs of the disease. Once that becomes possible, they would focus their efforts on creating medications that would stop Alzheimer’s progression. In other words, this test would function more as a early detecting and preventive one.
For now, the new method has a very promising prediction accuracy rate of 87%. Doctors can say whether a person is likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease in the next one year.
In order scientists to reach to this breakthrough they had to spend long years searching for the proteins which contain information that could be related to the disease. Our blood has thousands of proteins. Therefore, the process of finding these 10 proteins relevant to Alzheimer’s can be compared to searching for a needle in a haystack.
The new method could not only make early Alzheimer’s diagnosis possible, but it could also make it much more affordable to spot it earlier. It would not involve the complicated and unpleasant methods used at the moment, like cerebrospinal spinal fluid or brain imaging.
Scientists believe that in just a couple of years, Alzheimer’s disease blood test will become a reality. According to them, this discovery can is a “major step forward.”
