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Chinnapong – stock.adobe.com
To confirm the nature of this disease, we must now undergo extensive and expensive examinations. However, researchers show that a blood test can be just as effective before symptoms appear.
The idea of one day being able to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease with a simple blood test is fast becoming a reality. Silent, this neurodegenerative disease that affects more than a million French people sets in several years before the first symptoms appear, which means that the diagnosis is often late. Diagnosis is more difficult because specialists are forced to resort to expensive and sometimes invasive examinations, including imaging of the brain by PET scan (positron emission tomography) which can be supplemented by analysis of cerebrospinal fluid by puncture. Apart from memory tests, which are very non-specific and do not make it possible to distinguish Alzheimer’s from other types of dementia, these are currently the only methods for detecting the accumulation of tau protein in the brains of patients. Famous amyloid plaques (amyloid plaques). Amyloid beta protein aggregates around…