Researchers at Gyeongsang National University have developed a kit that can detect early-onset dementia.

A schematic diagram showing the structure of the probe complex for the study that detects early-onset dementia.

Hospitals have conventionally diagnosed Alzheimer's disease, which accounts for more than 70 percent of dementia, with positron emission tomography scans or cognitive tests.

However, these methods had limitations as they could only identify dementia after the symptoms progressed to a certain degree. The method was also costly and could only qualitatively express the patient's symptoms and not quantified indicators.

The team, led by Professor Kim Myeong-ok, aimed to overcome these limitations and maximize diagnosis and treatment of dementia before diagnosis and succeeded in developing an early-diagnosis kit that used secretions, such as blood, sweat and saliva. It raised the accuracy of dementia diagnosis by developing biomarkers of eight miRNAs, 13 antibodies, and 21 biomarkers to enable individualized diagnosis.

Professor Kim's team has already licensed out the kit to a medical device company and is undergoing clinical trials to commercialize the product later this year. The team expects that the registered patent technology and clinical data and methodology from medical device company will be useful for commercialization.

"In the case of dementia, we should find the solution focusing on precision health, where early diagnosis is important, in combination with precision medicine of post-treatment characteristics," Professor Kim said. "We plan to concentrate on overcoming dementia using multi-omics."

Scientific Report published the result of the study.

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