Autoantibody Panel Accurately Diagnoses Early-Stage Alzheimer's Disease

A blood test based on a panel of 50 autoimmune antibodies was shown to detect individuals with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) stage Alzheimer’s disease (AD) with an overall accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity rate of 100%.

Autoantibodies are abundant and ubiquitous in human sera and have been previously demonstrated as disease-specific biomarkers capable of accurately diagnosing mild-moderate stages of AD and Parkinson's disease. In the current study, investigators at Rowan University (Stratford, NJ, USA) sought to determine if autoantibodies could be used as biomarkers to accurately diagnose individuals with MCI that was driven by early stages of AD pathology.

To this end, they used human protein microarrays, each containing 9,486 unique human proteins, to bind serum autoantibodies. The investigators then utilized microarrays comprising the 50 autoantibody biomarkers with the highest binding affinity to analyze serum samples from 236 subjects, including 50 mild cognitive impairment (MCI) subjects with confirmed low amyloid-beta42 (AΒ42) levels.

Results revealed that a small panel of blood-borne autoantibody biomarkers could be used to distinguish subjects with AD-associated MCI from age-matched and gender-matched controls with an overall accuracy of 100%. In addition, MCI subjects were successfully differentiated from those with mild-moderate AD with similar overall accuracy, suggesting that this approach might also be useful for delineation of discrete disease stages along the MCI-to-AD continuum. Finally, the panel of AD-associated MCI biomarkers was highly specific for MCI in that they accurately distinguished AD-associated MCI subjects from those with other neurodegenerative and non-neurodegenerative diseases, including early and mild-moderate Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, and early-stage breast cancer.

“It is now generally believed that Alzheimer’s-related changes begin in the brain at least a decade before the emergence of telltale symptoms,” said senior author Dr. Robert Nagele, professor of osteopathic medicine at Rowan University. “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first blood test using autoantibody biomarkers that can accurately detect Alzheimer’s at an early point in the course of the disease when treatments are more likely to be beneficial – that is, before too much brain devastation has occurred.”

The study was published in the April 12, 2016, online edition of the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Diagnosis, Assessment & Disease Monitoring.

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