Detect early signs of Alzheimer's disease with novel biochip blood test

New Delhi: Alzheimer's disease is a progressive neurological disorder which is much more than just a memory loss and cognitive decline. It is a serious and complicated disease which is not reversible. It's really difficult to detect the early signs of Alzheimer's disease because many of us usually confuse the memory complaints with normal sings of aging.

But a group of researchers have developed a faster and more affordable method to identify which patients are at higher risk of Alzheimer's disease. Recently, at the 68th AACC Annual Scientific Meeting & Clinical Lab Expo, researchers introduced the biochip test that can conduct dozens of blood test on a single blood sample and also gives rapid diagnosis results.

This novel blood test method is both time and cost-saving. According to Science Daily, This test detects the presence of a protein in the blood produced by a specific variation of the apolipoprotein gene (ApoE4), which is associated with increased risk of developing Alzheimer's disease.

The risk of Alzheimer's disease increases 3-fold when the ApoE4 gene is inherited from one parent, and is increased 8–12 fold when inherited from both parents. In order to verify the accuracy of biochip test, reseachers analysed 384 samples and compared the results to those from a standard molecular diagnostic test.

On comparing both the tests, they found that the results of the two test are exactly the same. Biochip test gave accurate results in just 3 hours, enabling doctors to access quickly the risk of an individual developing Alzeihmer's disease.