Key Points
- The study is being conducted by researchers from the UK and China.
- They discovered proteins in frozen blood samples which could tell if a patient would develop one of several forms of dementia many years down the line.
- The research team shared their findings in hopes that they will speed up treatments.
Researchers from the UK and China have discovered that proteins in the blood could tell us if we're going to develop one of several types of dementia as early as a decade down the line.
The discovery, which was part of a study published in the journal of being conducted by multiple teams to find ways to identify patients who may be at risk of developing dementia using a blood test, has already been shared by the team.
They say they hope their breakthrough will help develop new treatments.
Up until this point, the only way to predict if a person was at risk of dementia was through brain scans which can detect high levels of a certain protein within a person's body.
However, those brain scans are usually pricey and not covered by health insurance.
Dr. Suzanne Schindler, an Alzheimer's researcher at Washington University in St. Louis, who was not involved in the research, says this breakthrough could help many people.
"Based on this study, it does seem likely that blood tests will be developed that can predict risk for developing dementia over the next 10 years, although individuals at higher risk often have difficulty knowing how to respond," she said.
The study's author Jian-Feng Feng from Shanghai University said this development could help many ageing populations, such as China.
He says he has already begun discussing the blood test's potential disposal in the commercial market.
Higher levels of (certain) protein in the blood, greater risk of dementia
Researchers from the University of Warwick and Fudan University examined 52,645 blood samples gathered between 2006 and 2010 from ordinary people who showed no signs of developing dementia.
In time, 1,417 of those people who took part in the study came up with some form of dementia.
The researchers studied protein signatures common in these individuals and turned up 1,463 proteins associated with dementia and ranked these according to how likely they were to predict dementia.
The study team found that people who had a higher amount of certain proteins (GFAP, NEFL, GDF15 and LTBP2) in their blood were more likely to develop some form of dementia.
People who were found with high levels of the GFAP protein in their blood were 2.32 times more likely to have dementia in the future.
The authors of the study noted that their research has yet to be independently validated.
Schindler said neurofilament light, one of the proteins that performed well during the study in predicting dementia, has already started being used by clinics for the prediction of certain types of dementia, such as multiple sclerosis.
Schindler says the study did not include clinically available blood tests for the prediction of Alzheimer's disease.
Such tests are already being used in identifying candidates for clinical trials testing treatments in patients with early-stage or even presymptomatic disease, such as Eisai, and Biogen's Leqembi.
The drug recently won regulatory approval in the United States, Japan and China.
