Today, by and large, patients receive a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s only after they exhibit well-known signs of the disease, such as memory loss. By that point, the best treatment options simply slow further progression of symptoms.
But research has shown that the seeds of Alzheimer’s are planted years — even decades — earlier, long before the cognitive impairments surface that make a diagnosis possible. Those seeds are amyloid beta proteins that misfold and clump together, forming small aggregates called oligomers. Over time, through a process scientists are still trying to understand, those “toxic” oligomers of amyloid beta are thought to develop into Alzheimer’s.
A team led by researchers at the University of Washington has developed a laboratory test that can measure levels of amyloid beta oligomers in blood samples. As they report in a paper published the week of Dec. 5 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, their test — known by the acronym SOBA — could detect oligomers in the blood of patients with Alzheimer’s disease, but not in most members of a control group who showed no signs of cognitive impairment at the time the blood samples were taken.
