A Blood Test Accurately Diagnosed Alzheimer’s 90% of the Time, Study Finds - The New York Times

It was much more accurate than primary care doctors using cognitive tests and CT scans. The findings could speed the quest for an affordable and accessible way to diagnose patients with memory problems. By Pam Belluck Scientists have made another major stride toward the long-sought goal of diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease with a simple blood test. On Sunday, a team of researchers reported that a blood test was significantly more accurate than doctors’ interpretation of cognitive tests and CT scans in signaling the condition. The study, published Sunday in the journal JAMA, found that about 90 percent of the time the blood test correctly identified whether patients with memory problems had Alzheimer’s. Dementia specialists using standard methods that did not include expensive PET scans or invasive spinal taps were accurate 73 percent of the time, while primary care doctors using those methods got it right only 61 percent of the time. “Not too long ago measuring pathology in the brain of a

It was much more accurate than primary care doctors using cognitive tests and CT scans. The findings could speed the quest for an affordable and accessible way to diagnose patients with memory problems. By Pam Belluck Scientists have made another major stride toward the long-sought goal of diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease with a simple blood test. On Sunday, a team of researchers reported that a blood test was significantly more accurate than doctors’ interpretation of cognitive tests and CT scans in signaling the condition. The study, published Sunday in the journal JAMA, found that about 90 pe