wglbFeb 24

Blood test boosts Alzheimer's diagnosis accuracy to 94.5%, clinical study shows

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-02-blood-boosts-alzheimer-diagnosis-accuracy.html

Blood test boosts Alzheimer's diagnosis accuracy to 94.5%, clinical study shows

A protein lurking around in the blood can help with the accurate diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease. In a recent study, researchers from Spain investigated how blood-based biomarkers, such as a protein called p-tau217, affect both the clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer's and neurologists' confidence in their diagnosis.

Medical Xpress
Show threadjanalsncm

For a disease which (to my knowledge) can’t be slowed down or reversed, I think it’s a fair question why we would want to detect Alzheimer’s. Maybe there are other reasons, but my suspicion is that we will be able to, and an easy detection method significantly widens the pool of subjects to study later on.

If it turns out that driving a Prius on Tuesdays slows down Alzheimer’s, a larger pool of subjects would allow us to figure that out.

Feb 24 at 3:43amWeb
Show threadmellingFeb 24

This again?

The test is optional. Feel free to skip it.

Tell 50 million people they’re likely to have Alzheimer’s then tell them where to donate towards a cure, or treatments to slow it by a decade.

Show threadtptacekFeb 24
Nobody is ever going to do that with this test, because the overwhelming majority of positive test results in a population-wide sample will be false, and the proposed diagnosis is devastating. This is a test for people who already have symptomatic dementia that helps confirm the diagnosis.
Show threadtptacekFeb 24

The accuracy of this test is nowhere nearly good enough to do population-wide screening. The clinical setting for this test is memory clinics in which Alzheimers is already relatively highly likely differentially, and even there you're going to get a surprising number of false positives.

(There's enough info in the supplemental link on this page to have an LLM do the Bayes math for you.)