New blood test checks for Alzheimer’s and assesses progression, study says

Researchers have developed a blood test for patients with thinking and memory problems to check if they have Alzheimer’s and to see how far it has progressed.The team behind the work say the test could help medics decide which drugs would be most suitable for patients. For example, new drugs such as donanemab and lecanemab can help slow the progression of Alzheimer’s, but only in people in the early stages of the disease.Prof Oskar Hansson from Lund University, a co-author of the work, said: “There is an urgent need for accurate and cost-effective Alzheimer diagnostics considering that many countries have recently approved the clinical use of amyloid-targeted therapies [such as donanemab and lecanemab].”Plaques of a protein called amyloid beta and the formation of tangles of another protein called tau in the brain are considered hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease.Writing in the journal Nature Medicine, Hansson and colleagues reported how they found fragments of tau, called eMTBR-tau243,...