Blood-based biomarker for tau for the detection of Alzheimer’s disease highly accurate - Alzheimer's Society comment

• Presented at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference (AAIC) 2020, an international team of researchers have identified a highly accurate blood-based biomarker for the detection of Alzheimer’s disease by measuring the levels of p-tau217 in the blood, and validated the findings in multiple, diverse populations.
• Blood P-tau217 detects Alzheimer’s disease with higher accuracy.
• The study found that blood p-tau217 could distinguish Alzheimer’s from other neurodegenerative disorders with diagnostic accuracy between 89 and 98 percent.

Fiona Carragher, Director of Research and Influencing at Alzheimer’s Society said:

'A cost effective, accurate and non-invasive diagnostic test is a vital step in developing new treatments for the 850,000 people living with dementia in the UK today. Excitingly, this blood test for tau appears to not only show signs of being able to accurately distinguish between Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative conditions, but also may detect changes before symptoms even appear.

It’s important that dementia research represents the many different people who live with Alzheimer’s disease across the globe so it’s great to see this research was carried out in a diverse population.

'Now we need longer and larger studies to validate these results and find out if this test could accelerate our ability to develop new treatments for Alzheimer’s disease in the future.'