Blood Test May Diagnose Alzheimer’s

A blood test for antibodies produced in the immune system may potentially be used in the future to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease in its early stage. Researchers at the Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Fla., compared six Alzheimer’s patients with six healthy people and six Parkinson’s disease patients and found three-fold more immunoglobulin (IgG) antibodies in all six Alzheimer’s diseases. For the blood test study, researchers used thousands of synthetic molecules to screen antibodies and found two of them were able to capture high concentrations of IgG antibodies only in Alzheimer’s patients. The blood test method, which was not based on the requirement of knowing the antigens that trigger the immune responses, could be potentially used to screen for biomarkers associated with other diseases as well.