Simply adding a blood test to a regular health screening could detect Alzheimer’s disease early, local researchers said.

A joint research team of Park Kyung-il, a professor at the Department of Neurology of Seoul National University Hospital Healthcare System Gangnam Center, and PeopleBio released the correlation analysis results amyloid-beta blood testing and the cognitive assessments for AD on Tuesday.

The research team evaluated 97 adults who visited the Gangnam Center for health screening. The participants received Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR) tests, Global Deterioration Scale (GDS) tests, and performed the Korean version of the Consortium to Establish a Registry for Alzheimer’s disease (CERAD-K). The researchers also measured the participants’ plasma oligomeric amyloid-β (OAβ) levels, apolipoprotein E (ApoE) genotype, and brain MRI.

Among the subjects, 55.7 percent was a normal group with normal aging and subjective cognitive disorder, and 40.2 percent had a mild cognitive disorder.

Among them, the group with Oaβ levels higher than 0.78ng/mL had significantly low GDS.

The results also showed that Oaβ levels were negatively correlated with CERAD-K scores.

Among the CERAD-K scores, in particular, word list memory and word list recall were closely related to Oaβ levels. When the researchers divided the participants into the normal and abnormal groups based on age, sex, and education years, the abnormal group had higher Oaβ levels.

Alzheimer’s disease begins with mild cognitive dysfunction. Once symptoms worsen, patients find it difficult to perform everyday activities.

For this reason, early detection and treatment are very important. Researchers are actively studying to find changes in early dementia.

Recently, researchers have developed a method to detect amyloid-beta levels in the blood.

The latest study is meaningful because it could find the correlation between the amyloid-beta blood test and the conventional test for neurocognitive assessment in people with mild cognitive disorder only, the research team said.

Also, amyloid-beta blood testing has the potential to detect dementia early, the research team added.

“We confirmed that the blood test was sensitive enough to detect dementia before symptoms appeared,” Professor Park said. “This shows that the blood test could replace a complex cognitive function test.”

The results of the study have been introduced in Diagnostics, published by the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Lab.

SNUH’s Gangnam Center has provided amyloid-beta blood testing as one of the tests to prevent dementia since March.

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