Test for early Alzheimer's 'seems possible'

Cognitive skills decline with dementia

A lumbar puncture test combined with a brain scan can identify patients with early tell-tale signs of dementia, they believe.

Ultimately, doctors could use this to select patients to try out drugs that may slow or halt the disease.

Currently there is no single test or cure for dementia, a condition that affects over 800,000 people in the UK.

Experts are working hard to find treatments that prevent the disease or at least slow its progression.

Unmet need

Although there are many candidate drugs and vaccines in the pipeline, it is hard for doctors to test how well these work because dementia is usually diagnosed only once the disease is more advanced.

Dr Jonathan Schott and colleagues at the Institute of Neurology, University College of London, believe they can now detect the most common form of dementia - Alzheimer's disease - at its earliest stage, many years before symptoms appear.

Their approach checks for two things - shrinkage of the brain and lower than normal levels of a protein, called amyloid, in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) that bathes the brain and spinal cord.

Experts already know that in Alzheimer's there is loss of brain volume and an unusual build up of amyloid in the brain, meaning less amyloid in the CSF.

Dr Schott's team reasoned that looking for these changes might offer a way of detecting the condition long before than is currently possible.

To confirm this, they recruited 105 healthy volunteers to undergo a series of checks.

Scans can reveal tell-tale brain shrinkage

The volunteers had lumbar puncture tests to check their CSF for levels of amyloid and MRI brain scans to calculate brain shrinkage.

The results, published in Annals of Neurology, revealed that the brains of those normal individuals with low CSF levels of amyloid (38% of the group), shrank twice as quickly as the other group............................................................

Read the article in full at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-12051045

By Michelle Roberts, Health Reporter