Blood Test Detects Alzheimer’s Damage Before Symptoms

Summary: Researchers report a new blood test can help detect neurological damage associated with Alzheimer’s disease before any of the cognitive symptoms appear. Additionally, researchers report the test may be applied to help identify brain damage associated with TBI, stroke and multiple sclerosis.

Source: WUSTL.

A simple blood test reliably detects signs of brain damage in people on the path to developing Alzheimer’s disease – even before they show signs of confusion and memory loss, according to a new study from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases in Germany.

The findings, published Jan. 21 in Nature Medicine, may one day be applied to quickly and inexpensively identify brain damage in people with not just Alzheimer’s disease but other neurodegenerative conditions such as multiple sclerosis, traumatic brain injury or stroke.

“This is something that would be easy to incorporate into a screening test in a neurology clinic,” said Brian Gordon, PhD, an assistant professor of radiology at Washington University’s Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology and an author on the study. “We validated it in people with Alzheimer’s disease because we know their brains undergo lots of neurodegeneration, but this marker isn’t specific for Alzheimer’s. High levels could be a sign of many different neurological diseases and injuries.”

The test detects neurofilament light chain, a structural protein that forms part of the internal skeleton of neurons. When brain neurons are damaged or dying, the protein leaks out into the cerebrospinal fluid that bathes the brain and spinal cord and from there, into the bloodstream.

Finding high levels of the protein in a person’s cerebrospinal fluid has been shown to provide strong evidence that some of their brain cells have been damaged. But obtaining cerebrospinal fluid requires a spinal tap, which many people are reluctant to undergo. Senior author Mathias Jucker, PhD, a professor of cellular neurology at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases in Tübingen, along with Gordon and colleagues from all over the world, studied whether levels of the protein in blood also reflect neurological damage.

They turned to a group of families with rare genetic variants that cause Alzheimer’s at a young age – typically in a person’s 50s, 40s or even 30s. The families form the study population of the Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer’s Network (DIAN), an international consortium led by Washington University that is investigating the roots of Alzheimer’s disease. A parent with such a mutation has a 50 percent chance of passing the genetic error to a child, and any child who inherits a variant is all but guaranteed to develop symptoms of dementia near the same age as his or her parent. This timeline gives researchers an opportunity to study what happens in the brain in the years before cognitive symptoms arise.

The researchers studied more than 400 people participating in the DIAN study, 247 who carry an early-onset genetic variant and 162 of their unaffected relatives. Each participant had previously visited a DIAN clinic to give blood, undergo brain scans and complete cognitive tests. Roughly half had been evaluated more than once, typically about two to three years apart.

In those with the faulty gene variant, protein levels were higher at baseline and rose over time. In contrast, protein levels were low and largely steady in people with the healthy form of the gene. This difference was detectable 16 years before cognitive symptoms were expected to arise.

In addition, when the researchers took a look at participants’ brain scans, they found that how quickly the protein levels rose tracked with the speed with which the precuneus – a part of the brain involved in memory – thinned and shrank.

“Sixteen years before symptoms arise is really quite early in the disease process, but we were able to see differences even then,” said Washington University graduate student Stephanie Schultz, one of the paper’s co-first authors. “This could be a good preclinical biomarker to identify those who will go on to develop clinical symptoms.”

To find out whether protein blood levels could be used to predict cognitive decline, the researchers collected data on 39 people with disease-causing variants when they returned to the clinic an average of two years after their last visit. The participants underwent brain scans and two cognitive tests: the Mini-Mental State Exam and the Logical Memory test. The researchers found that people whose blood protein levels had previously risen rapidly were most likely to show signs of brain atrophy and diminished cognitive abilities when they revisited the clinic.

“It will be important to confirm our findings in late-onset Alzheimer´s disease and to define the time period over which neurofilament changes have to be assessed for optimal clinical predictability,” said Jucker, who leads the DIAN study in Germany.

blood vial
Each participant had previously visited a DIAN clinic to give blood, undergo brain scans and complete cognitive tests. Roughly half had been evaluated more than once, typically about two to three years apart. NeuroscienceNews.com image is in the public domain.

All kinds of neurological damage can cause the neurofilament light protein to spill out of neurons and into blood. Protein levels are high in people with Lewy body dementia and Huntington’s disease; they rise dramatically in people with multiple sclerosis during a flare-up and in football players immediately after a blow to the head.

A commercial kit – very similar to the one used by the authors – is available to test for protein levels in the blood, but it has not been approved by the FDA to diagnose or predict an individual’s risk of brain damage. Before such a test can be used for individual patients with Alzheimer’s or any other neurodegenerative condition, researchers will need to determine how much protein in the blood is too much, and how quickly protein levels can rise before it becomes a cause for concern.

“I could see this being used in the clinic in a few years to identify signs of brain damage in individual patients,” said Gordon, who is also an assistant professor of psychological & brain sciences. “We’re not at the point we can tell people, ‘In five years you’ll have dementia.’ We are all working towards that.”

About this neuroscience research article

Funding: Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer Network, NIH/National Institute on Aging, German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases, NIH/National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke, National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health funded this study.

Source: Diane Duke Williams – WUSTL
Publisher: Organized by NeuroscienceNews.com.
Image Source: NeuroscienceNews.com image is in the public domain.
Original Research: Abstract for “Serum neurofilament dynamics predicts neurodegeneration and clinical progression in presymptomatic Alzheimer’s disease” by Oliver Preische, Stephanie A. Schultz, Anja Apel, Jens Kuhle, Stephan A. Kaeser, Christian Barro, Susanne Gräber, Elke Kuder-Buletta, Christian LaFougere, Christoph Laske, Jonathan Vöglein, Johannes Levin, Colin L. Masters, Ralph Martins, Peter R. Schofield, Martin N. Rossor, Neill R. Graff-Radford, Stephen Salloway, Bernardino Ghetti, John M. Ringman, James M. Noble, Jasmeer Chhatwal, Alison M. Goate, Tammie L. S. Benzinger, John C. Morris, Randall J. Bateman, Guoqiao Wang, Anne M. Fagan, Eric M. McDade, Brian A. Gordon, Mathias Jucker, Ricardo Allegri, Fatima Amtashar, Randall Bateman, Tammie Benzinger, Sarah Berman, Courtney Bodge, Susan Brandon, William Brooks, Jill Buck, Virginia Buckles, Sochenda Chea, Jasmeer Chhatwal, Patricio Chrem, Helena Chui, Jake Cinco, Jack Clifford, Carlos Cruchaga, Mirelle D’Mello, Tamara Donahue, Jane Douglas, Noelia Edigo, Nilufer Erekin-Taner, Anne Fagan, Marty Farlow, Angela Farrar, Howard Feldman, Gigi Flynn, Nick Fox, Erin Franklin, Hisako Fujii, Cortaiga Gant, Samantha Gardener, Bernardino Ghetti, Alison Goate, Jill Goldman, Brian Gordon, Neill Graff-Radford, Julia Gray, Jenny Gurney, Jason Hassenstab, Mie Hirohara, David Holtzman, Russ Hornbeck, Siri Houeland DiBari, Takeshi Ikeuchi, Snezana Ikonomovic, Gina Jerome, Mathias Jucker, Celeste Karch, Kensaku Kasuga, Takeshi Kawarabayashi, William Klunk, Robert Koeppe, Elke Kuder-Buletta, Christoph Laske, Jae-Hong Lee, Johannes Levin, Daniel Marcus, Ralph Martins, Neal Scott Mason, Colin Masters, Denise Maue-Dreyfus, Eric McDade, Lucy Montoya, Hiroshi Mori, John Morris, Akem Nagamatsu, Katie Neimeyer, James Noble, Joanne Norton, Richard Perrin, Marc Raichle, John Ringman, Jee Hoon Roh, Stephen Salloway, Peter Schofield, Hiroyuki Shimada, Tomoyo Shiroto, Mikio Shoji, Wendy Sigurdson, Hamid Sohrabi, Paige Sparks, Kazushi Suzuki, Laura Swisher, Kevin Taddei, Jen Wang, Peter Wang, Mike Weiner, Mary Wolfsberger, Chengjie Xiong & Xiong Xu in Nature Medicine. Published January 21 2019.
doi:10.1038/s41591-018-0304-3

Cite This NeuroscienceNews.com Article

[cbtabs][cbtab title=”MLA”]WUSTL”Blood Test Detects Alzheimer’s Damage Before Symptoms.” NeuroscienceNews. NeuroscienceNews, 21 January 2019.
<https://neurosciencenews.com/alzheimers-blood-test-10596/>.[/cbtab][cbtab title=”APA”]WUSTL(2019, January 21). Blood Test Detects Alzheimer’s Damage Before Symptoms. NeuroscienceNews. Retrieved January 21, 2019 from https://neurosciencenews.com/alzheimers-blood-test-10596/[/cbtab][cbtab title=”Chicago”]WUSTL”Blood Test Detects Alzheimer’s Damage Before Symptoms.” https://neurosciencenews.com/alzheimers-blood-test-10596/ (accessed January 21, 2019).[/cbtab][/cbtabs]


Abstract

Serum neurofilament dynamics predicts neurodegeneration and clinical progression in presymptomatic Alzheimer’s disease

Neurofilament light chain (NfL) is a promising fluid biomarker of disease progression for various cerebral proteopathies. Here we leverage the unique characteristics of the Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer Network and ultrasensitive immunoassay technology to demonstrate that NfL levels in the cerebrospinal fluid (n = 187) and serum (n = 405) are correlated with one another and are elevated at the presymptomatic stages of familial Alzheimer’s disease. Longitudinal, within-person analysis of serum NfL dynamics (n = 196) confirmed this elevation and further revealed that the rate of change of serum NfL could discriminate mutation carriers from non-mutation carriers almost a decade earlier than cross-sectional absolute NfL levels (that is, 16.2 versus 6.8 years before the estimated symptom onset). Serum NfL rate of change peaked in participants converting from the presymptomatic to the symptomatic stage and was associated with cortical thinning assessed by magnetic resonance imaging, but less so with amyloid-β deposition or glucose metabolism (assessed by positron emission tomography). Serum NfL was predictive for both the rate of cortical thinning and cognitive changes assessed by the Mini–Mental State Examination and Logical Memory test. Thus, NfL dynamics in serum predict disease progression and brain neurodegeneration at the early presymptomatic stages of familial Alzheimer’s disease, which supports its potential utility as a clinically useful biomarker.

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