Biomarkers are very much on the minds of participants at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference in Paris. In the absence of a cure, the emphasis is on earlier detection and diagnosis. An important component to this strategy is settling on standards for Alzheimer's biomarkers. A release from the conference outlines two ideas on how to settle on an early diagnosis that can be reproduced no matter where in the world it's being made.
"We need to identify people in the earliest stages of Alzheimer's, even those without outward evidence of memory and thinking symptoms, for treatment and prevention trials," Maria Carrillo, senior director of Medical and Scientific Relations at the Alzheimer's Association, said in a statement. "It is very important that the tests are accurate and effective, and that they are delivered and measured in the same way across the world so that measures are comparable."
One study compared results of brain amyloid imaging and the impact of genetics and ethnicity on those results across countries on three different continents as part of a worldwide Alzheimer's disease imaging study, the release said. The other proposed creation of a standard international method for measuring the size of the hippocampus, a key memory center in the brain and often one of the first brain areas affected by Alzheimer's.
- read the release from the Alzheimer's Association