New York City-based Mount Sinai Health System will be among the first institutions in the world to use blood tests to detect Alzheimer's disease and related dementias. The health system will offer the tests as a part of the Davos Alzheimer's Collaborative Healthcare System Preparedness Accurate Diagnosis project.
Alzheimer's and other dementias are typically detected through proteins found in positron emission tomography scans and cerebrospinal fluid analysis. The new tests being offered at Mount Sinai will detect those proteins through a blood draw, according to a Sept. 16 news release from the health system.
Nine-hundred patients will be enrolled in the project and followed for six months as part of the Davos Alzheimer's Collaborative project. The test will look for biomarkers p-tau 217, NfL and GFAP to detect and quantify brain degeneration.
"Moving detection of brain degenerative disorders to blood is an incredible leap forward toward slowing down disease progression and ultimately, developing cures for dementia-causing pathologies," Fanny Elahi, MD, PhD, director of fluid biomarkers at Mount Sinai's Maurice Deane Center for Wellness and Cognitive Health, said in the release. "What we're measuring today is just a tip of the iceberg of so much more to come."
Other U.S. institutions participating in the project are University of Kansas Health System and University of Kansas Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center in Fairway, Kan., and Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C., according to the release.