Abstract

The clinical diagnosis and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) represent a challenge to clinicians due to variability of clinical symptomatology as well as the unavailability of reliable diagnostic tests. Biomarkers used in structural and molecular neuroimaging have helped both in improving the accuracy of AD clinical diagnosis and in monitoring disease progression. However, many of these are restricted to specialized dementia centres. Although cerebrospinal fluid biomarkers are recommended to aid AD diagnosis, these are not widely used in routine clinical settings, and alternatives, e.g. blood dementia tests, may be better suited.
The current proposal will address total blood levels of some of dementia characteristic proteins, such as Amyloid beta protein (Ab), Amyloid Protein Precursor (APP), clusterin and a-synuclein and examine whether they can discriminate between distinct types of dementia, including AD, Vascular Dementia and Dementia with Lewy Body. Our hypothesis is that AD subjects will have higher levels of Ab, APP and clusterin, and this triad of blood biomarkers will have high sensitivity and specificity to differentiate AD from other types of dementia and normal ageing. The findings have a potential to be translated into a hand-held device to be used for screening for dementia in primary care setting.