SAN JOSE, CALIF. — A San Francisco company’s blood test shows promise in diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease – as well as predicting who will succumb to the brain-disabling ailment – according to researchers at Stanford University and several other institutions.
For a study published Sunday in the journal Nature Medicine, the test developed by Satoris was used to examine more than 200 samples of blood taken from people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and others unaffected by the disease.
The U.S. and European scientists also checked blood drawn from people with mild cognitive impairments two to six years before the patients developed Alzheimer’s.
The test – which spots Alzheimer’s by detecting unusual activity in 18 proteins associated with the disease – was determined to be 90 percent correct in diagnosing the malady and 91 percent accurate in predicting who will be afflicted by it, according to the study.
“It’s quite exciting,” said Dr. Lennart Mucke, director of the Gladstone Institute of Neurological Disease, who didn’t participate in the study.
While cautioning that the test needs to be validated in larger studies, he added, “It does look very promising.”
There is no cure for Alzheimer’s, which affects more than 4.5 million people in this country, according to the National Institute on Aging.
In most cases, doctors who suspect a patient’s mental decline is a result of Alzheimer’s use a process of elimination in diagnosing the disease, essentially weeding out stroke, tumors, alcoholism and other possible causes. But while specialists at major medical centers generally are able to do such a diagnosis, doctors elsewhere sometimes have trouble spotting Alzheimer’s, especially in its early stages, experts say.
That’s why having a simple blood test to detect Alzheimer’s would be invaluable, said Dr. Todd Golde, chairman of the Jacksonville Mayo Clinic’s neuroscience department and a Satoris scientific adviser who wasn’t part of the study.
Patrick Lynn, Satoris’ chief executive, said he hopes by next year to begin selling the test to labs and to sell it for general use by 2009.
