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New Blood Test Predicts When Alzheimer’s Symptoms Will Begin
The blood test uses plasma p-tau217 to predict Alzheimer’s symptom onset with a three to four year accuracy, aiding targeted preventive trials and treatment planning.
- Thursday's Nature Medicine paper shows researchers at WashU developed a plasma `clock` using p‑tau217 to estimate Alzheimer’s symptom onset within three to four years.
- Funded by the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health Biomarkers Consortium, the project aims to enable earlier biological detection via blood tests to accelerate clinical trials and interventions.
- The team analyzed data from more than 600 people aged 62 to 78 and found plasma p‑tau217 measured with PrecivityAD2 and ADNI assays predicted symptom onset, with a positive result at 60 linked to symptoms 20 years later.
- In the short term, researchers expect the approach to accelerate trials by identifying people likely to develop symptoms soon, but experts including Zaldy Tan, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, caution against testing asymptomatic individuals outside research.
- With dementia costs approaching nearly $400 billion in 2025, researchers urge replication in larger, more diverse populations and note study authors with consulting ties to diagnostic companies.
20 Articles
20 Articles
Blood Test Could Tell You When Alzheimer's Symptoms Will Start
Researchers say they're edging closer to a kind of countdown clock for Alzheimer's. A study published Thursday in Nature Medicine reports that a blood test tracking a protein called p-tau217 can estimate when someone is likely to develop symptoms, with a margin of about three to four years, per the...
New Blood Test Predicts When Alzheimer’s Symptoms Will Begin
A new blood test could predict when Alzheimer’s will strike — years before symptoms begin. Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have created a way to estimate when a person is likely to begin showing symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease using a single blood test. In research published today (February 19) in [...]
A single blood test can predict when Alzheimer's symptoms will begin. An international team of researchers has developed a method to predict when Alzheimer's symptoms are likely to appear using a single blood test. Researchers at the University of Washington School of Medicine in the United States used the levels of a specific protein in the blood to predict when Alzheimer's symptoms will appear.
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