Healthcare

A seminal advancement in neurological diagnostics has emerged from a National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded study, revealing that a novel blood test utilizing circular RNAs (circRNAs) can predict the onset of Alzheimer’s disease symptoms with unprecedented accuracy.

The Science of Prediction

Current Alzheimer’s blood tests offer reliable diagnoses by detecting markers of amyloid plaques, a hallmark of the disease. However, these tests can produce positive results potentially decades before cognitive impairment, making them less informative about how a patient’s disease will progress. In contrast, circRNAs are far more dynamic, reflecting the brain’s more recent activity and diverging from normal levels about two to four years prior to symptom onset.

"In a clinical setting, being able to identify patients on the verge of symptom onset would be invaluable. Having this information could help us select the right patients for clinical trials and better determine which treatments are effective at preventing cognitive decline." — Dr. Richard Hodes, Director of NIH’s National Institute on Aging

Clinical Implications

Researchers analyzed blood data from over 1,200 individuals across multiple independent cohorts, identifying a set of 34 circRNAs associated with Alzheimer’s pathology. Predictive models based on these molecules successfully identified individuals with the disease, performing similarly to models trained on pTau217, the leading clinical blood-based biomarker. Crucially, the circRNA model far surpassed the pTau217 model when forecasting future progression, nearly tripling the predictive accuracy for symptomatic onset.

Together with commercial partners, the research team is currently working to develop translatable clinical assays for these blood-based circRNAs, aiming to grant clinicians a more complete perspective of a patient's overall disease biology.

Official Source

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Read the full original report on the NIH Website