Nature paper | Georgetown release
Georgetown professor Howard Federoff and colleagues have developed a blood test they claim has the potential to predict whether a person will develop symptoms of dementia within two or three years.
The test was identified in a preliminary study involving 525 people over 70. The subjects’ cognitive skills, memory skills, and blood were tested annually for five years. Mass spectrometry was used to analyze the blood plasma of 53 participants with mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer’s disease, including 18 who developed symptoms during the study, and 53 who remained cognitively healthy. The researchers found ten phospholipids that were present at consistently lower levels in the blood of most people who had, or went on to develop, cognitive impairment. The team validated the results in a set of 41 further participants.