Simple blood check that could help to find dementia early

participants who have Alzheimer’s brain changes but no cognitive problems.

The new blood test could screen for people with early signs of disease so they can participate in clinical trials.

Study senior author Professor Randall Bateman said: “Right now we screen people for clinical trials with brain scans, which is time-consuming and expensive, and enrolling participants takes years. But with a blood test we could potentially screen thousands of people a month.

“That means we can enrol participants more efficiently in clinical trials, to help us find treatments faster.

“It could have an enormous impact on the cost of the disease as well as the human suffering that goes with it.”

The new blood test uses a technique called “mass spectrometry” to measure the amounts of two forms of amyloid beta in the blood.

The current study involved 158 adults over the age of 50. All but 10 were cognitively normal and each provided at least one blood sample and underwent a PET brain scan.

The researchers classified each blood sample and scan as either amyloid positive or negative.

They found that the participant’s blood test agreed with their PET scan 88 per cent of the time.

To improve the test’s accuracy, the researchers incorporated a number of major risk factors for Alzheimer’s, including age and the presence of the genetic variant APOE4.

When the researchers included age and APOE4 status the accuracy of the blood test rose to 94 per cent.

Prof Bateman added: “If you want to screen a population for a prevention trial, you would have to screen, say, 10,000 people, just to get 1,500 or 2,000 that would qualify.

“Reducing the number of PET scans could enable us to conduct twice as many clinical trials for the same amount of time and money.

“It’s not the $4,000 (£3,300) per PET scan that we’re worried about. It’s the millions of patients that are suffering while we don’t have a treatment.

“If we can run these trials faster, that will get us closer to ending this disease.” COMEDIANS Bob Mortimer and Paul Whitehouse have helped prolong the lives of men with their frank discussions about heart operations on TV. The comics discuss Bob’s triple bypass and Paul’s stents on their hit series Gone Fishing. And their openness about health issues has prompted many to get themselves checked out. Paul, 61, said: “We got people saying, ‘Thanks for the laughs’, but it’s very different when you get people coming up and saying, ‘Thanks, my dad watched your show and as a result, I made him go and get his heart checked.’

“It’s been very rewarding for a couple of old cynics.”

In the new series starting tonight, the pair travel around the UK to fish and muse about the world’s big and small stuff and visit the surgeon who carried out Bob’s life-saving heart surgery in 2015.