Professor Sebastiaan Engelborghs (pictured) and Professor Peter De Deyn of the memory clinic of the University of Antwerp, worked with colleagues in Sweden and the US, as well as from Ghent University and bio-tech company Innogenetics, on a method of diagnosing Alzheimer’s in patients in which symptoms are not yet determined, or where the patient is suffering only mild memory impairment, such as may be considered normal in many older people.
According to the article in the latest issue of the US medical journal Archives of Neurology, more than 400 older people were examined: 100 already diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, 114 with no visible cognitive dysfunction and 196 with mild memory impairment. The research identified a combination of three proteins in the subjects’ cerebro-spinal fluid, which allowed researchers to identify which patients were suffering from Alzheimer’s with 90% certainty. For patients with slight cognitive problems, the rate was 72%, and for the control group 36%.
When the results were combined with research on known Alzheimer’s patients, the research group was able to build a model that can now with almost 100% certainty predict who will go on to develop Alzheimer’s.
“We have already used the predictive test on a large scale in a research context,” Professor De Deyn said. “Patients were not given the results, but now that the predictive value of the test is clear, it could be introduced clinically.” Test kits have now been developed by Innogenetics.
The team was keen to make one thing clear: this research does not provide a cure for Alzheimer’s, only a diagnosis. And some parties, among them the Flemish League against Alzheimer’s, argue that many people would prefer not to know if they are going to develop the disease, particularly at the current level of treatment.
“A predictive test like this raises a certain number of ethical objections,” a league spokesman said. “Not everyone wants to know. That’s also true for a number of inherited forms of Alzheimer’s: when the disease appears, family members are asked if they are interested in genetic screening. A great many people decline to be tested.”
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