A truly comprehensive test for Alzheimer’s disease may be on the horizon, Elizabeth Tracey reports

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A new blood test for Alzheimer’s disease isn’t a stand alone diagnostic tool. That’s according to Abhay Moghekar, a blood biomarkers expert and a neurologist at Johns Hopkins.

Moghekar: You would still need the clinical input in the context of how the patient is functioning you know is a cognitive impairment actually causing functional impairment and you need a reliable marker of all these different pathologies in some kind of a composite test and I think we are headed there and this is one step.     :18

Moghekar says the presence of tau and amyloid alone does not mean Alzheimer’s is present.

Moghekar: Community based studies including the nun study have shown pure Alzheimer's disease is actually very rare. As we get older there's a contribution of vascular dementia, people have Lewy body dementia, multiple proteinopathies are the norm the older you get.  :15

Moghekar says precision is important in diagnosis as new interventions are developed. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.