A new blood test for Alzheimer’s is showing great early results. Here’s why this matters for everybody.
Right now, the two gold standard for diagnosing Alzheimers – the most common type of dementia – are scanning your brain or testing fluid from your spine through a spinal tap, which are either expensive or invasive. And that’s a problem, because it’s contributing to the estimated 41 million cases of dementia that go undiagnosed across the globe.
This new blood test would be much cheaper and simpler – a game changer. It works by looking for a protein that is a strong indicator of Alzheimer’s. In a study, it performed similarly to the spinal tap method with a reported 95% accuracy at detecting the disease. This is huge, because a lot of the treatments for Alzheimer’s rely on early detection. And with so many cases, it’s likely this could help someone you know now or in the future.
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