Alzheimer’s marker yields blood test

From Washington, D.C., at the Experimental Biology 2007 meeting

Despite memory-test and brain-imaging advances in recent years, diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease remains a challenge. Usually, only the presence of clumps of the protein amyloid-beta in the brain at autopsy confirms that a person’s dementia was Alzheimer’s. A study in mice, however, suggests that a test for excess amyloid-beta in the blood could signal Alzheimer’s even before any symptoms show up.