Alzheimer\u2019s & Dementia<\/a>.<\/p>\n\u201cRight now, many patients get labeled with a single diagnosis of, say, Alzheimer\u2019s or Parkinson\u2019s, but in reality their brains often show a mixture of disease injuries. Current tools simply weren\u2019t designed to capture that,\u201d says senior author Carlos Cruchaga, a professor in the psychiatry department at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur goal was to build a test that doesn\u2019t just say \u2018yes\u2019 or \u2018no\u2019 to one disease but instead gives an indication of all the major neurodegenerative diseases happening in that person. That\u2019s what you really need for precision diagnosis and, ultimately, precision treatment.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cruchaga, who also directs WashU Medicine\u2019s NeuroGenomics and Informatics Center, worked with collaborators to create an inexpensive, noninvasive tool that reflects the true biological complexity of the aging or neurodegenerating brain in a way that could support early diagnosis, ongoing monitoring, and personalized treatment.<\/p>\n
To build the new test, the team selected a set of 15 proteins found in the blood that reflect neurodegenerative pathology in the brain. These included well-validated markers of Alzheimer\u2019s pathology alongside proteins involved in synapse and nerve damage and inflammation.<\/p>\n
Cruchaga\u2019s team trained and tested an AI classifier on blood protein data from more than 3,200 individuals collected by the Charles F. and Joanne Knight Alzheimer Disease Research Center and the WashU Medicine neurology department\u2019s section of movement disorders, including people with clinical diagnoses of Alzheimer\u2019s disease, Parkinson\u2019s disease, frontotemporal dementia, dementia with Lewy bodies, and cognitively normal controls.<\/p>\n
The model\u2019s performance was then verified on a separate group of 225 individuals who were cognitively evaluated during life and had their brains examined at autopsy. The classifier\u2019s outputs aligned closely with the actual pathological burden found in brain tissue and the clinical presentation of dementia when the individuals were living. The tool achieved an overall diagnostic accuracy of 92.3%, appropriately identifying cases when a patient had been diagnosed with a single neurodegenerative disease.<\/p>\n
The test also showed promise in providing insights to cases when the diagnosis had been uncertain or evolving.<\/p>\n
For instance, in people who had mild cognitive impairment and for those with \u201cother\u201d or ambiguous neurological diagnoses, the model\u2019s prediction for having Alzheimer\u2019s closely matched the actual burden of amyloid plaques\u2014protein clumps in the brain that play a role in cognitive decline\u2014found at autopsy.<\/p>\n
The model also identified Alzheimer-like biological changes in people who carried a Parkinson\u2019s diagnosis during life but later developed dementia, underscoring its ability to detect mixed pathology that clinical assessment alone would miss.<\/p>\n
The test is not yet ready for clinical use. Cruchaga notes that further validation in larger, more diverse populations is needed to confirm its generalizability, and prospective studies tracking patients over time will be required to assess how well it predicts disease progression and guides treatment.<\/p>\n
But the potential applications are broad.<\/p>\n
In research, a blood-based multi-disease classifier could help identify the right patients for clinical trials targeting specific disease pathways and enable large-scale population studies that would be impractical to conduct with costly brain scans or spinal taps.<\/p>\n
In the clinic, the tool could help physicians decide which patients need further follow-up, which specialists they should see, and, ultimately, which treatments or preventive strategies might be most effective.<\/p>\n
Support for this work came from the National Institutes of Health, the Cure Alzheimer\u2019s Fund, and the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson\u2019s Research. Work at the Banner Alzheimer\u2019s Institute and Banner Sun Health Research Institute was supported by NIH grants, the Arizona Department of Health Services, the Arizona Biomedical Research Commission, and Gates Ventures.<\/p>\n
The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH.<\/p>\n
Source: Washington University in St. Louis<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Share this Article You are free to share this article under the Attribution 4.0 International license. Researchers have…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":452995,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[363,125368,799,134,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-452994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-blood-tests","tag-dementia","tag-health","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/452994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=452994"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/452994\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/452995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=452994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=452994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=452994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}