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New Test Could Detect Early Stages Of Alzheimer’s

Posted on: Wednesday, 27 May 2009, 13:50 CDT

In an effort to speed the development of what could be the first test to detect the earliest stages of Alzheimer's, a research institute devoted to Alzheimer's and related diseases has teamed up with a major maker of diagnostic tests, The Associated Press reported.

Dr. Daniel Alkon, scientific director of the Blanchette Rockefeller Neurosciences Institute, said the first commercial version of the test could be available in 12 to 18 months if all goes well, possibly enabling patients to try to slow progression of the increasingly common disease.

Alkon told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview on Tuesday that the new plan could be a way of monitoring how effective a treatment is for Alzheimer's disease through periodic retesting once scientists can develop a medicine to stop the mind-robbing disease.

Alkon said the test works by detecting abnormal function of a protein that has been shown to be involved in memory storage.

The process would begin with a small sample of cells being removed from a patient's skin at a doctor's office or testing center and shipped to the institute.

Scientists would then be able to grow the skin cells in a glass dish and add a substance to stimulate an enzyme called PKC to make the protein combine with the element phosphorous inside the skin cells.

Alkon said if too much phosphorous ends up in the combination, then the patient has Alzheimer's.

The test has already been attempted on over 300 patients at 15 hospitals, including 42 for whom the Alzheimer's diagnosis was later confirmed.

The only definitive way to diagnose Alzheimer’s is by an autopsy showing the disease's signature pattern of damage to the brain.

Alkon said the test was 98 percent accurate on the autopsied patients, but only 11 of those had early Alzheimer's; very few people die within three or four years of the disease starting.

However, Alkon hopes to test thousands more patients before his diagnostic test is marketed.

The institute's test needs more evaluation, particularly among patients with early symptoms, to determine its accuracy and researchers elsewhere also need to be able to duplicate the results, according to Dr. Ralph Nixon, vice chairman of the Alzheimer's Association's medical and scientific advisory council.

Nixon, a professor of psychiatry and cell biology at New York University School of Medicine, said he believes it's a potentially promising direction that has some basis in the science of Alzheimer's disease.

Early diagnoses of Alzheimer's are often is wrong, because it's based on evaluating a patient's behavior and trying to rule out other causes for the disease’s common symptoms.

But early diagnosis would help patients better plan their future and would even allow them to take steps to slow the disease, such as improving their diet and getting more "mental exercise" or getting into a clinical study of one of the many promising experimental drugs, Nixon said.

Those people with a family history of Alzheimer's and are worried about their risk might benefit the most from Alkon’s testing.

Current tests in development require painful removal of cerebrospinal fluid, but Alkon said his test has the advantage since it is not invasive and would only cost a few hundred dollars, making it much cheaper than advanced brain imaging, which can show a pattern of plaque buildup in the brain that indicates a person might eventually develop the condition.

Recently, the institute also won U.S. approval to begin small tests in Alzheimer's patients with an "incredibly potent" natural substance that activates the PKC enzyme—something Alkon said might turn out to be a treatment.

Nixon said that while it's too early to tell whether that approach would work, he acknowledged it was not unreasonable.

Early symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, which affects more than 5 million Americans, include difficulty recalling recent events or being unable to recognize loved ones.

Advanced stages can lead to losing all sense of time and place, wandering and physical aggression.

Companies in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries are currently spending millions of dollars to develop treatments that would actually stop or reverse the course of the disease.

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On the Net:

• Blanchette Rockefeller Neurosciences Institute

Source: redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports

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