Who is a candidate for the new blood test for Alzheimer’s disease? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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The FDA has just cleared a blood test to help make the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, which otherwise may require some fairly invasive methods. Blood biomarkers expert Abhay Moghekar, a neurologist at Johns Hopkins, says the test looks for the presence of two proteins, beta amyloid and tau, that are seen in the brains of people with the disease.

Moghekar (Abhay) Even though the approval is the ratio of phosphorylated tau 217 to amyloid beta 42 both of these actually reflect amyloid pathology in the brain and not necessarily the whole pathology of Alzheimer's disease. So we have to be careful. And for the purists in the audience it's an important distinction. This test does not tell you definitively you have Alzheimer's disease. We can say with confidence that this test reflects the presence of amyloid pathology in the brain.                   :31

Moghekar says expert assessment is also needed before a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease is made. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.