Study may yield way to test for Alzheimer’s

British scientists have identified a set of 10 proteins in the blood that can predict the onset of Alzheimer’s and call this an important step toward developing a test for the incurable disease.

Such a test could be used to select patients for clinical trials of experimental treatments being developed to try to halt progression of Alzheimer’s, the researchers said, and may one day move into routine use in doctors’ clinics.

“Alzheimer’s begins to affect the brain many years before patients are diagnosed, (and) many of our drug trials fail because by the time patients are given the drugs the brain has already been too severely affected,” said Simon Lovestone of Oxford University, wholed thiswork from King’s College London.

“A simple blood test could help us identify patients at a much earlier stage to take part in new trials and hopefully develop treatments,” he said.

Proteome Sciences was co-author of the study with scientists from King’s College.

For the study, published in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia, Lovestone’s team used blood samples from 1,148 people — 476

Overweight and obese people with arthritis in their knees tend to report more pain than slimmer people with the chronic joint disease, a new study suggests.

Past studies have found that heavier people are more likely to develop osteoarthritis and often have more severe osteoarthritis.

This study, published in the journal Rheumatology, goes a step further. It suggests

“A simple blood test could help us identify patients at a much earlier stage to take part in new trials.”

with Alzheimer’s, 220 with mild cognitive impairment and 452 elderly controls without dementia. They were analyzed for 26 proteins previously found to be linked with Alzheimer’s.

The team found 16 of these 26 proteins to be strongly associated with brain shrinkage in either mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer’s and then ran a second series of tests to see which of these could predict which patients would progress from mild cognitive impairment to Alzheimer’s.

With this second series, they found a combination of 10 proteins capable of predicting with 87 percent accuracy whether people with mild cognitive impairment would develop Alzheimer’s within a year.

Research links heavier people to more arthritis knee pain

people with a higher body mass index may have more pain than normalweight people with the same amount of arthritisrelated damage.

“I wanted to link up BMI,(osteoarthritis) severity and pain to try to see what causes the pain,” said Elizabeth Weiss, an anthropologist at San Jose State University in California.

Weiss studied the health records of almost 5,000 people: 1,390 had already been diagnosed with knee osteoarthritis, 3,284 did not have the disease butwere at risk for it, and 122 did not have osteoarthritis or related risk factors.

She found that patients with a higher BMI reported more pain, even after accounting for the severity of joint damage.