According to WHO, more than 55 million people are living with dementia worldwide. Someone in the world develops dementia every 3 seconds and there are nearly 10 million new cases every year.
Alzheimer’s disease can take years to diagnose, require expensive tests and brain scans
Now, a new blood test has proven to be as accurate as expensive brain scans or spinal taps to diagnose dementia.
A less expensive blood test for Alzheimer’s disease as an alternative to the costly and invasive tests
Researchers from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis (MO, USA) have developed a low-cost and non-invasive blood test for the detection of Alzheimer’s disease.
The non-invasive blood test has proven to be up to 93% accurate to detect early signs of Alzheimer’s disease. The study was conducted in approx. 500 patients from the US, Australia, and Sweden.
Currently, the gold standard for detecting Alzheimer’s is the PET brain scan, which is quite expensive…costing between US$5000–8000 per scan. Alternate test while cheaper at US$1000 requires an invasive spinal tap process.
In contrast, this new blood test is less invasive and costs just US$500. The test assesses whether the accumulation of amyloid plaques has started in the brain by evaluating the ratio of the amyloid-beta proteins Aβ42 and Aβ40 levels in the blood.
