A Blood Test for Alzheimer's?

Update: more doubts on the statistical power behind this, and the coverage it's getting in the press. There's word of a possible early diagnostic blood test for Alzheimer's. A large team (mostly from Georgetown and Rochester) has published a paper in Nature Medicine on their search for lipid-based markers of incipient disease. They say that they have a ten-lipid panel that has a 90% success rate in predicting cognitive decline within three years. I can certainly see how this would be possible - lipids could be markers of membrane trouble and myelin trouble, and we already know that the lipoprotein ApoE4 is linked with Alzheimer's. At the same time, I'd like to see how this looks when more data are available. The absolute number of patients showing the effect isn't large. And there's always a danger, on these biomarker fishing expeditions, of finding a spurious correlation. The fact that it takes ten lipids to get the accuracy up could be OK, or it could be a sign of statistical trouble. (It's a bit like seeing a QSAR model that needs ten parameters to be predictive). But this could indeed be real, and if it is, a larger sample will nail it down. That should also give a much better idea of the false-positive and false-negative rates, which will be very important in a diagnosis like this. It'll also be interesting to see if the time horizon can be improved past three years. The usual worries about an Alzheimer's diagnostic apply - some people will want to know, and others w...
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: Alzheimer ' s Disease Source Type: blogs