Science Friday Podcast Recap: Could a Blood Test Help Diagnose Alzheimer's?

On a recent episode of the Science Friday podcast with host Ira Flatow, he and his guest Howard Federov - professor of neurology and Executive Vice President of Health Sciences at Georgetown University in Washington - discussed Federov's recent discovery regarding the diagnosing of Alzheimer's. Currently, about 5 million Americans are afflicted with Alzheimer's disease of which there has yet to be a cure found. On top of it be incurable to date, it is also difficult to predict who will have Alzheimer's. Howard Federov lead a preliminary study involving a blood test that has the potential to successfully predict Alzheimer's. In this experiment, he took blood samples from those with and without Alzheimer's. The experiment attempted at identifying cognitively normal people of 70 years old or older, and from this group a subset emerged of people that developed cognitive impairment, a.k.a. Alzheimer's. What the scientists discovered from the blood tests is that there were 10 lipids circulating in the blood of the people in the subset that developed Alzheimer's, and those lipids were predictive of the event where they would develop the disease. Though the scientists are not certain of the role that these lipids play in Alzheimer's, they do know that the people with Alzheimer's had a lower concentration of these lipids than those without the disease. They also discovered that these lipids can provide them with 90% certainty of their prediction that the person will develop Alzheimer's in two or more years. Scientists now are wondering if they can test people at a younger age, for if it could be diagnosed earlier, medicines could perhaps be tested to see if they could delay the disease. Federov claims there is definitely further testing to be done since this was merely a preliminary study. It will take much more testing before doctors would begin to give patients the same test at an ordinary doctor's office. Even so, this study can definitely be a source of hope for the millions of lives that this disease has affected.