Alzheimer’s is a progressive disease that does not have any cure or prevention. Its onset is automatic, and it slowly eats away at the memories of the patient, eventually killing them. The diagnosis of the illness used to be a difficult task, because of which it was only possible to identify the disease through the symptoms after it was too late. Although there is no cure for the disease, the early diagnosis and corresponding lifestyle changes can slow down the progression of the disease.
The fight to find a cure or medicine for the disease has been a huge challenge for the medical fraternity. Now. a team of US researchers have finally cracked the code of early diagnosis of the disease.
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“We developed a genetic predictor of Alzheimer’s disease associated with both clinical diagnosis and age-dependent cognitive decline. By studying the circulating proteome of healthy individuals with very high versus low inherited risk, our team nominated new biomarkers of neurocognitive disease,” The Sun reported senior author Dr. Amit Khera as saying.
Previous studies into treatments may have been unsuccessful due to the patients already suffering from the disease for long. The diagnosis study came after Manish Paranjpe of the Board Institute of MIT and Harvard in the US, analyzed the data from 7.1 million common DNA variants.
While this is a huge step forward in the diagnosis and possible treatment of the disease, researchers also stated that the DNA-based method is “unlikely to be suitable for doctors to predict a patient’s risk of Alzheimer’s because it may be less accurate for non-European populations.”
Alzheimer’s disease builds up in brain for up to 20 years before the patient starts to show symptoms. Some symptoms of Alzheimer’s are memory loss, repetition, misplacement of things, confusion, disorientation, loss of language skills, mood, and behavioral changes and more.
