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Tag Archives: detect
Navy admiral expresses ‘concern’ with Pentagon’s ability to detect Chinese spy balloons – The Hill
- Navy admiral expresses ‘concern’ with Pentagon’s ability to detect Chinese spy balloons The Hill
- ‘Everyone’s trying to row in the same direction’: Spy balloon saga tests bipartisan China committee CNN
- ‘No evidence’ China surveillance flights were used to spread COVID, says House Intel committee member Fox News
- CNN Forces GOP Rep to Admit There’s ‘No Evidence’ Spy Balloon Had ‘Bioweapons’ Yahoo News
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Navy admiral expresses ‘concern’ with Pentagon’s ability to detect Chinese spy balloons – The Hill
- Navy admiral expresses ‘concern’ with Pentagon’s ability to detect Chinese spy balloons The Hill
- ‘Everyone’s trying to row in the same direction’: Spy balloon saga tests bipartisan China committee CNN
- ‘No evidence’ China surveillance flights were used to spread COVID, says House Intel committee member Fox News
- CNN Forces GOP Rep to Admit There’s ‘No Evidence’ Spy Balloon Had ‘Bioweapons’ Yahoo News
- US lawmakers urged to boost trade blocs, alliances after Chinese balloon row South China Morning Post
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ChatGPT maker OpenAI launches tool to detect text written by AI
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, walks from lunch during the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference on July 6, 2022, in Sun Valley, Idaho.
Kevin Dietsch | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Artificial intelligence research startup OpenAI on Tuesday introduced a tool that’s designed to figure out if text is human-generated or written by a computer.
The release comes two months after OpenAI captured the public’s attention when it introduced ChatGPT, a chatbot that generates text that might seem to have been written by a person in response to a person’s prompt. Following the wave of attention, last week Microsoft announced a multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI and said it would incorporate the startup’s AI models into its products for consumers and businesses.
Schools were quick to limit ChatGPT’s use over concerns the software could hurt learning. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, said education has changed in the past after technology such as calculators has emerged, but he also said there could be ways for the company to help teachers spot text written by AI.
OpenAI’s new tool can make mistakes and is a work in progress, company employees Jan Hendrik Kirchner, Lama Ahmad, Scott Aaronson and Jan Leike wrote in a blog post, noting that OpenAI would like feedback on the classifier from parents and teachers.
“In our evaluations on a ‘challenge set’ of English texts, our classifier correctly identifies 26% of AI-written text (true positives) as ‘likely AI-written,’ while incorrectly labeling human-written text as AI-written 9% of the time (false positives),” the OpenAI employees wrote.
This isn’t the first effort to figure out if text came from a machine. Princeton University student Edward Tian earlier this month announced a tool called GPTZero, noting on the tool’s website that it was made for educators. OpenAI itself issued a detector in 2019 alngside a large language model, or LLM, that’s less sophisticated than what’s at the core of ChatGPT. The new version is more prepared to handle text from recent AI systems, the employees wrote.
The new tool is not strong at analyzing inputs containing fewer than 1,000 characters, and OpenAI doesn’t recommend using it on languages other than English. Plus, text from AI can be updated slightly to keep the classifier from correctly determining that it’s not mainly the work of a human, the employees wrote.
Even back in 2019, OpenAI made clear that identifying synthetic text is no easy task. It intends to keep pursuing the challenge.
“Our work on the detection of AI-generated text will continue, and we hope to share improved methods in the future,” Hendrik Kirchner, Ahmad, Aaronson and Leike wrote.
WATCH: China’s Baidu developing AI-powered chatbot to rival OpenAI, report says
Ants can detect the scent of cancer in urine
Ants can be trained to detect cancer in urine, a new study finds.
Although ant sniffing is a long way from being used as a diagnostic tool in humans, the results are encouraging, the researchers said.
Because ants lack noses, they use olfactory receptors on their antennae to help them find food or sniff out potential mates. For the study, published Jan. 25 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (opens in new tab), scientists trained nearly three dozen silky ants (Formica fusca) to use these acute olfactory receptors for a different task: finding tumors.
In a lab, scientists grafted slices of breast cancer tumors from human samples onto mice and taught the 35 insects to “associate urine from the tumor-bearing rodents with sugar,” according to The Washington Post (opens in new tab). Once placed in a petri dish, the ants spent 20% more time next to urine samples containing cancerous tumors versus healthy urine, according to the study.
“They just want to eat sugar,” Baptiste Piqueret (opens in new tab), the study’s lead author and an ethologist at Sorbonne Paris North University in France, told The Washington Post.
Related: Some cancer cells grow stronger after chemo. Research hints at how to kill them.
Because tumor cells contain volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that researchers can use as cancer biomarkers, animals such as dogs — and now ants — can be quickly trained to detect these anomalies through their sense of smell. However, researchers think that ants “may have the edge over dogs and other animals that are [more] time-consuming to train,” according to The Washington Post.
This is important because the earlier cancer is detected, the sooner treatment can begin. The researchers are hopeful that cancer-sniffing ants have the potential “to act as efficient and inexpensive cancer bio-detectors,” they wrote in their study.
“The results are very promising,” Piqueret said. However, he cautioned that “it’s important to know that we are far from using them as a daily way to detect cancer.”
Astronomers from Canada, IISc detect signal from distant galaxy
Astronomers from McGill University in Canada and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) have used data from the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT), in Pune, to detect a radio signal originating from atomic hydrogen in an extremely distant galaxy.
The IISc said on Monday that the astronomical distance over which the signal has been picked up is “the largest so far by a large margin”.
The findings have been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
While detection of radio waves with 21 cm wavelength, emitted by atomic hydrogen, is possible through low-frequency radio telescopes like GMRT, the “extremely weak” nature of the radio signal makes it nearly impossible to detect emissions from a distant galaxy.
The most distant galaxy detected through the 21-cm emission, so far, was at redshift z=0.376.
The value denotes the look-back time, or the time elapsed between the detection and the original emission; in this case, 4.1 billion years.
Arnab Chakraborty, postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Physics and Trottier Space Institute of McGill University, and Nirupam Roy, associate professor, department of Physics, IISc, used data from GMRT to detect a radio signal from atomic hydrogen in a distant galaxy at redshift z=1.29.
IISc said in an official statement that the signal was emitted when the universe was only 4.9 billion years old, which translated to a look-back time of 8.8 billion
years.
Atomic hydrogen – formed when hot ionised gas from the surrounding medium of a galaxy falls onto the galaxy, and cools – and its subsequent change into molecular hydrogen leads to the formation of stars. Studying the evolution of neutral gas, therefore, becomes critical in understanding the evolution of galaxies.
The GMRT was built and is operated by National Centre for Radio Astrophysics – Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Pune. The research was funded by McGill and IISc.
The astronomers traced the detection to a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, which causes the light emitted by the source to bend due to the presence of another massive body, “such as an early type elliptical galaxy,” between the observer and the target galaxy, resulting in a signal that is magnified. “In this specific case, the magnification of the signal was about a factor of 30, allowing us to see through the high redshift universe,” Roy said.
The detection significantly increases possibilities in observing atomic gas from galaxies at cosmological distances and studying the cosmic evolution of neutral gas with low-frequency radio telescopes.
Yashwant Gupta, Centre Director at NCRA, called detection of neutral hydrogen in emission from the distant universe one of GMRT’s “key science goals”.
Knife that ‘smells tumours’ can detect womb cancer within seconds | Cancer
A revolutionary surgical knife that “smells tumours” can diagnose womb cancer within seconds, researchers have found in a breakthrough that could enable thousands of healthy women to get the all-clear quicker.
The disease is the fourth most common cancer in women and affects about 9,000 a year in the UK, but only about 10% of those with suspected symptoms who undergo a biopsy are found to have it.
Now experts at Imperial College London have discovered that the iKnife, a device that is already used to treat breast and brain cancers, can accurately detect the presence of endometrial cancer.
“The iKnife reliably diagnosed endometrial cancer in seconds, with a diagnostic accuracy of 89%, minimising the current delays for women whilst awaiting a histopathological diagnosis,” the team of researchers wrote in the journal Cancers. “The findings presented in this study can pave the way for new diagnostic pathways.”
The iKnife uses electrical currents to differentiate between cancerous and healthy tissue by analysing the smoke that is emitted when the biopsy tissue is vaporised, after it has been removed from the womb.
The researchers said its effectiveness was proved using biopsy tissue samples from 150 women with suspected womb cancer, and the results compared with current diagnosis methods. The team plans to launch a major clinical trial, which could lead to its use becoming widespread.
Athena Lamnisos, the chief executive of the Eve Appeal cancer charity, which funded the research, said: “Waiting for test results is stressful – especially if that test is to find out whether or not you have cancer. When you hear that the ‘c’ word is even a possibility, the days can’t pass quickly enough until a clinician gives you the all clear.
“Womb cancer has one ‘red flag’ symptom of postmenopausal bleeding that should always get checked out on a two-week referral from your GP. To wait a further two weeks for the results can be really hard for patients.
“There are many reasons for abnormal vaginal bleeding after the menopause – womb cancer is just one of them – the ability to provide a diagnostic test that rules cancer in or out immediately, and with accuracy, could make such a positive difference.
“This Eve-supported research has the potential to create a step change in faster diagnosis, and for the 90% of women with postmenopausal bleeding that isn’t cancer, a really effective way to put their minds at ease. We know how important this is for patients.”
Alison, a 57-year-old from west London who had symptoms of womb cancer earlier this year but eventually got the all-clear, said the iKnife would have made a huge difference to her experience.
“Thankfully, I was one of the people with postmenopausal bleeding lucky enough to find out it wasn’t caused by cancer. It was really frustrating waiting for the results, which was almost three weeks for me.
“I was asked to go in person to receive the results too, which to me was a clear indication that it was bad news and I did have womb cancer. It was terrifying.
“It would have made such a difference to know straight away that I didn’t have cancer and not have to wait three weeks.”
Prof Sadaf Ghaem-Maghami, who led the research at Imperial College London, said getting a diagnosis within seconds could enable women confirmed to have cancer to start treatment sooner, while those deemed healthy would avoid weeks of anxiety.
“The iKnife has the potential to completely revolutionise the way we manage people seen in the rapid-access clinics with significant abnormal vaginal bleeding who have been referred for potential diagnosis of endometrial cancer.
“With its high diagnostic accuracy of 89% and positive predictive value of 94%, one could immediately reassure the person of the very low likelihood of having cancer if the iKnife result is negative and expedite further tests and scans and treatment for people whose biopsies indicate presence of cancer. This could happen whilst awaiting confirmation from standard pathology, which can take up to two weeks.”
New Biomarker Can Detect Neurodegeneration in Blood
Neuroscientists have developed a groundbreaking test that can detect a unique marker of Alzheimer’s disease neurodegeneration in a blood sample.
A group of neuroscientists developed a test to detect a novel marker of
“At present, diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease requires neuroimaging,” said senior author Thomas Karikari, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychiatry at Pitt. “Those tests are expensive and take a long time to schedule, and a lot of patients, even in the U.S., don’t have access to MRI and PET scanners. Accessibility is a major issue.”
Currently, to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease, clinicians use guidelines set in 2011 by the National Institute on Aging and the Alzheimer’s Association. The guidelines, called the AT(N) Framework, require detection of three distinct components of Alzheimer’s pathology—the presence of amyloid plaques, tau tangles, and neurodegeneration in the brain—either by imaging or by analyzing CSF samples.
Thomas Karikari, Ph.D. Credit: Thomas Karikari
Unfortunately, both approaches suffer from economical and practical limitations, dictating the need for development of convenient and reliable AT(N) biomarkers in blood samples, collection of which is minimally invasive and requires fewer resources. The development of simple tools detecting signs of Alzheimer’s in the blood without compromising on quality is an important step toward improved accessibility, said Karikari.
“The most important utility of blood biomarkers is to make people’s lives better and to improve clinical confidence and risk prediction in Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis,” Karikari said.
Current blood diagnostic methods can accurately detect abnormalities in
By applying their knowledge of molecular biology and biochemistry of tau proteins in different tissues, such as the brain, Karikari and his team, including scientists at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, developed a technique to selectively detect BD-tau while avoiding free-floating “big tau” proteins produced by cells outside the brain.
To do that, they designed a special antibody that selectively binds to BD-tau, making it easily detectible in the blood. They validated their assay across over 600 patient samples from five independent cohorts, including those from patients whose Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis was confirmed after their deaths, as well as from patients with memory deficiencies indicative of early-stage Alzheimer’s.
The tests showed that levels of BD-tau detected in blood samples of Alzheimer’s disease patients using the new assay matched with levels of tau in the CSF and reliably distinguished Alzheimer’s from other neurodegenerative diseases. Levels of BD-tau also correlated with the severity of amyloid plaques and tau tangles in the brain tissue confirmed via brain autopsy analyses.
Scientists hope that monitoring blood levels of BD-tau could improve clinical trial design and facilitate screening and enrollment of patients from populations that historically haven’t been included in research cohorts.
“There is a huge need for diversity in clinical research, not just by skin color but also by socioeconomic background,” said Karikari. “To develop better drugs, trials need to enroll people from varied backgrounds and not just those who live close to academic medical centers. A blood test is cheaper, safer and easier to administer, and it can improve clinical confidence in diagnosing Alzheimer’s and selecting participants for clinical trial and disease monitoring.”
Karikari and his team are planning to conduct large-scale clinical validation of blood BD-tau in a wide range of research groups, including those that recruit participants from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds, from memory clinics, and from the community. Additionally, these studies will include older adults with no biological evidence of Alzheimer’s disease as well as those at different stages of the disease. These projects are crucial to ensure that the biomarker results are generalizable to people from all backgrounds, and will pave the way to making BD-tau commercially available for widespread clinical and prognostic use.
Reference: “Brain-derived tau: a novel blood-based biomarker for Alzheimer’s disease-type neurodegeneration” by Fernando Gonzalez-Ortiz, Michael Turton, Przemyslaw R Kac, Denis Smirnov, Enrico Premi, Roberta Ghidoni, Luisa Benussi, Valentina Cantoni, Claudia Saraceno and Jasmine Rivolta, 27 December 2022, Brain.
DOI: 10.1093/brain/awac407
Additional authors of this study are Fernando Gonzalez-Ortiz, B.S., Przemyslaw Kac, B.S., Nicholas Ashton, Ph.D., and Henrik Zetterberg, M.D., Ph.D., of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden; Michael Turton, Ph.D., and Peter Harrison, Ph.D., of Bioventix Plc, Farnham, U.K.; Denis Smirnov, B.S., and Douglas Galasko, M.D., of the University of California, San Diego; Enrico Premi, M.D., Valentina Cantoni, Ph.D., Jasmine Rivolta, Ph.D., and Barbara Borroni, M.D., of the University of Brescia, Italy; and Roberta Ghidoni, Ph.D., Luisa Benussi, Ph.D., and Claudia Saraceno, Ph.D., of RCCS Istituto Centro San Giovanni di Dio Fatebenefratelli, Brescia, Italy.
This research was supported by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskåpradet; #2021-03244), the Alzheimer’s Association (#AARF-21-850325), the BrightFocus Foundation (#A2020812F), the International Society for Neurochemistry’s Career Development Grant, the Swedish Alzheimer Foundation (Alzheimerfonden; #AF-930627), the Swedish Brain Foundation (Hjärnfonden; #FO2020-0240), the Swedish Dementia Foundation (Demensförbundet), the Swedish Parkinson Foundation (Parkinsonfonden), Gamla Tjänarinnor Foundation, the Aina (Ann) Wallströms and Mary-Ann Sjöbloms Foundation, the Agneta Prytz-Folkes & Gösta Folkes Foundation (#2020-00124), the Gun and Bertil Stohnes Foundation and the Anna Lisa and Brother Björnsson’s Foundation, among other sources.
New Biomarker Test Can Detect Alzheimer’s Neurodegeneration in Blood
Summary: A newly developed blood test can detect brain-derived tau (BD-tau), a biomarker of Alzheimer’s disease neurodegeneration.
Source: University of Pittsburgh
A group of neuroscientists led by a University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine researcher developed a test to detect a novel marker of Alzheimer’s disease neurodegeneration in a blood sample.
A study on their results was published today in Brain.
The biomarker, called “brain-derived tau,” or BD-tau, outperforms current blood diagnostic tests used to detect Alzheimer’s-related neurodegeneration clinically. It is specific to Alzheimer’s disease and correlates well with Alzheimer’s neurodegeneration biomarkers in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF).
“At present, diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease requires neuroimaging,” said senior author Thomas Karikari, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychiatry at Pitt. “Those tests are expensive and take a long time to schedule, and a lot of patients, even in the U.S., don’t have access to MRI and PET scanners. Accessibility is a major issue.”
Currently, to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease, clinicians use guidelines set in 2011 by the National Institute on Aging and the Alzheimer’s Association. The guidelines, called the AT(N) Framework, require detection of three distinct components of Alzheimer’s pathology—the presence of amyloid plaques, tau tangles and neurodegeneration in the brain—either by imaging or by analyzing CSF samples.
Unfortunately, both approaches suffer from economical and practical limitations, dictating the need for development of convenient and reliable AT(N) biomarkers in blood samples, collection of which is minimally invasive and requires fewer resources.
The development of simple tools detecting signs of Alzheimer’s in the blood without compromising on quality is an important step toward improved accessibility, said Karikari.
“The most important utility of blood biomarkers is to make people’s lives better and to improve clinical confidence and risk prediction in Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis,” Karikari said.
Current blood diagnostic methods can accurately detect abnormalities in plasma amyloid beta and the phosphorylated form of tau, hitting two of the three necessary checkmarks to confidently diagnose Alzheimer’s.
But the biggest hurdle in applying the AT(N) Framework to blood samples lies in the difficulty of detecting markers of neurodegeneration that are specific to the brain and aren’t influenced by potentially misleading contaminants produced elsewhere in the body.
For example, blood levels of neurofilament light, a protein marker of nerve cell damage, become elevated in Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s and other dementias, rendering it less useful when trying to differentiate Alzheimer’s disease from other neurodegenerative conditions. On the other hand, detecting total tau in the blood proved to be less informative than monitoring its levels in CSF.
By applying their knowledge of molecular biology and biochemistry of tau proteins in different tissues, such as the brain, Karikari and his team, including scientists at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, developed a technique to selectively detect BD-tau while avoiding free-floating “big tau” proteins produced by cells outside the brain.
To do that, they designed a special antibody that selectively binds to BD-tau, making it easily detectible in the blood. They validated their assay across over 600 patient samples from five independent cohorts, including those from patients whose Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis was confirmed after their deaths, as well as from patients with memory deficiencies indicative of early-stage Alzheimer’s.
The tests showed that levels of BD-tau detected in blood samples of Alzheimer’s disease patients using the new assay matched with levels of tau in the CSF and reliably distinguished Alzheimer’s from other neurodegenerative diseases. Levels of BD-tau also correlated with the severity of amyloid plaques and tau tangles in the brain tissue confirmed via brain autopsy analyses.
Scientists hope that monitoring blood levels of BD-tau could improve clinical trial design and facilitate screening and enrollment of patients from populations that historically haven’t been included in research cohorts.
“There is a huge need for diversity in clinical research, not just by skin color but also by socioeconomic background,” said Karikari.
“To develop better drugs, trials need to enroll people from varied backgrounds and not just those who live close to academic medical centers. A blood test is cheaper, safer and easier to administer, and it can improve clinical confidence in diagnosing Alzheimer’s and selecting participants for clinical trial and disease monitoring.”
Karikari and his team are planning to conduct large-scale clinical validation of blood BD-tau in a wide range of research groups, including those that recruit participants from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds, from memory clinics, and from the community. Additionally, these studies will include older adults with no biological evidence of Alzheimer’s disease as well as those at different stages of the disease.
These projects are crucial to ensure that the biomarker results are generalizable to people from all backgrounds, and will pave the way to making BD-tau commercially available for widespread clinical and prognostic use.
Additional authors of this study are Fernando Gonzalez-Ortiz, B.S., Przemysław Kac, B.S., Nicholas Ashton, Ph.D., and Henrik Zetterberg, M.D., Ph.D., of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden; Michael Turton, Ph.D., and Peter Harrison, Ph.D., of Bioventix Plc, Farnham, U.K.; Denis Smirnov, B.S., and Douglas Galasko, M.D., of the University of California, San Diego; Enrico Premi, M.D., Valentina Cantoni, Ph.D., Jasmine Rivolta, Ph.D., and Barbara Borroni, M.D., of the University of Brescia, Italy; and Roberta Ghidoni, Ph.D., Luisa Benussi, Ph.D., and Claudia Saraceno, Ph.D., of RCCS Istituto Centro San Giovanni di Dio Fatebenefratelli, Brescia, Italy.
Funding: This research was supported by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskåpradet; #2021-03244), the Alzheimer’s Association (#AARF-21-850325), the BrightFocus Foundation (#A2020812F), the International Society for Neurochemistry’s Career Development Grant, the Swedish Alzheimer Foundation (Alzheimerfonden; #AF-930627), the Swedish Brain Foundation (Hjärnfonden; #FO2020-0240), the Swedish Dementia Foundation (Demensförbundet), the Swedish Parkinson Foundation (Parkinsonfonden), Gamla Tjänarinnor Foundation, the Aina (Ann) Wallströms and Mary-Ann Sjöbloms Foundation, the Agneta Prytz-Folkes & Gösta Folkes Foundation (#2020-00124), the Gun and Bertil Stohnes Foundation and the Anna Lisa and Brother Björnsson’s Foundation, among other sources.
About this Alzheimer’s disease research news
Author: Anastasia Gorelova
Source: University of Pittsburgh
Contact: Anastasia Gorelova – University of Pittsburgh
Image: The image is in the public domain
See also
Original Research: Open access.
“Brain-derived tau: a novel blood-based biomarker for Alzheimer’s disease-type neurodegeneration” by Thomas Karikari et al. Brain
Abstract
Brain-derived tau: a novel blood-based biomarker for Alzheimer’s disease-type neurodegeneration
Blood-based biomarkers for amyloid beta and phosphorylated tau show good diagnostic accuracies and agreements with their corresponding CSF and neuroimaging biomarkers in the amyloid/tau/neurodegeneration [A/T/(N)] framework for Alzheimer’s disease.
However, the blood-based neurodegeneration marker neurofilament light is not specific to Alzheimer’s disease while total-tau shows lack of correlation with CSF total-tau. Recent studies suggest that blood total-tau originates principally from peripheral, non-brain sources.
We sought to address this challenge by generating an anti-tau antibody that selectively binds brain-derived tau and avoids the peripherally expressed ‘big tau’ isoform. We applied this antibody to develop an ultrasensitive blood-based assay for brain-derived tau, and validated it in five independent cohorts (n = 609) including a blood-to-autopsy cohort, CSF biomarker-classified cohorts and memory clinic cohorts.
In paired samples, serum and CSF brain-derived tau were significantly correlated (rho = 0.85, P < 0.0001), while serum and CSF total-tau were not (rho = 0.23, P = 0.3364). Blood-based brain-derived tau showed equivalent diagnostic performance as CSF total-tau and CSF brain-derived tau to separate biomarker-positive Alzheimer’s disease participants from biomarker-negative controls.
Furthermore, plasma brain-derived tau accurately distinguished autopsy-confirmed Alzheimer’s disease from other neurodegenerative diseases (area under the curve = 86.4%) while neurofilament light did not (area under the curve = 54.3%). These performances were independent of the presence of concomitant pathologies. Plasma brain-derived tau (rho = 0.52–0.67, P = 0.003), but not neurofilament light (rho = −0.14–0.17, P = 0.501), was associated with global and regional amyloid plaque and neurofibrillary tangle counts.
These results were further verified in two memory clinic cohorts where serum brain-derived tau differentiated Alzheimer’s disease from a range of other neurodegenerative disorders, including frontotemporal lobar degeneration and atypical parkinsonian disorders (area under the curve up to 99.6%).
Notably, plasma/serum brain-derived tau correlated with neurofilament light only in Alzheimer’s disease but not in the other neurodegenerative diseases. Across cohorts, plasma/serum brain-derived tau was associated with CSF and plasma AT(N) biomarkers and cognitive function.
Brain-derived tau is a new blood-based biomarker that outperforms plasma total-tau and, unlike neurofilament light, shows specificity to Alzheimer’s disease-type neurodegeneration.
Thus, brain-derived tau demonstrates potential to complete the AT(N) scheme in blood, and will be useful to evaluate Alzheimer’s disease-dependent neurodegenerative processes for clinical and research purposes.
Researchers develop blood test that can reliably detect Alzheimer’s disease
When doctors need to confirm an Alzheimer’s diagnosis, they often turn to a combination of brain imaging and cell analysis. Both have their downsides. The latter involves a lumbar puncture, an invasive and painful procedure that’s more commonly known as a spinal tap. A doctor will insert a needle into the lower back to extract a sample of the patient’s cerebrospinal fluid. A lab technician then tests the sample for signs of progressive nerve cell loss and excessive amyloid and tau protein accumulation. MRI scans are less invasive but they’re often expensive and accessibility is an issue; not every community has access to the technology.
The next best tool for diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease is a blood test. While some can detect abnormal tau protein counts, they’re less effective at spotting the telltale signs of neurodegeneration. But that could soon change. This week, in the journal , a multinational team made up of researchers from Sweden, Italy, the UK and US detailed a new antibody-based blood test they recently developed. The new test can detect brain-derived tau proteins, which are specific to Alzheimer’s disease. Following a study of 600 patients, the team found their test could reliably distinguish the illness from other neurodegenerative diseases.
Dr. Thomas Karikari, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh and one of the co-authors of the study, he hopes the breakthrough could help other researchers design better clinical trials for Alzheimer’s treatments. “A blood test is cheaper, safer and easier to administer, and it can improve clinical confidence in diagnosing Alzheimer’s and selecting participants for clinical trial and disease monitoring,” he said. There’s more work to be done before the test makes its way to your local hospital. To start, the team needs to validate that it works for a wide variety of patients, including those who come from different ethnic backgrounds.
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