A new post from UCSF magazine features Gil and other UCSF professors giving their insights on emerging blood tests for Alzheimer's Disease.
Gil Rabonivici reflects on the importance that PET had on being able to identify biomarkers in vivo. He also highlights the importance that it still has, featuring IDEAS and NEW-IDEAS. IDEAS (which enrolled around 11.000 patients) showed that providing amyloid PET scans to physicians led to changes in care of 60% of patients, such as new drug prescriptions or counseling. Looking forward, NEW-IDEAS will focus on studying amyloid PET on historically underrepresented populations, such as Black and Latinx communities.
Adam Boxer highlights the promising findings of tau biomarkers on plasma for Alzheimer's Disease diagnosis (and it's correlation with PET and CSF biomarkers). One major challenge is to understand how medications or co-existing medical conditions affect their performance in blood. However, plasma biomarkers could be a game changer specially for people who have trouble accessing health care - considering the price difference between PET and blood biomarkers (about $5.000 vs $1.500 aprox).
Ken Covinsky and Maria Glymour highlight the ethical and societal consequences that blood biomarkers might encounter. They highlight the potential stress that an early diagnosis might create on patients, specially when available treatments (aducanumab and lecanemab) are close to $30.000 a year. Maria Glymour also questions if treatment changes in biomarkers values would actually prevent or slow down memory loss and cognitive impairment.
Adam Boxer weights back in to state that treatments might be more likely to be effective if the disease is diagnosed early. He also highlights an ongoing study called AHEAD, which is measuring Alzheimer’s plasma biomarkers before participants show cognitive symptoms and assess whether lecanemab can delay memory loss.
Finally, Kristine Yaffe highlights that while we wait for treatments, people can change their lifestyle to decrease their risk for Alzheimer's Disease. Some modifiable risk factors mentioned are getting enough high-quality sleep, staying physically active, eating a plant-based or Mediterranean diet, and controlling other conditions that affect cognition, like hypertension, diabetes, obesity, and high cholesterol.
