High levels of a blood protein called clusterin are linked to the development of Alzheimer’s disease, scientists said on Monday — a finding which could pave the way for doctors to detect the disease before it takes hold.
Researchers from the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London said that while doctors are around five years away from being able to use the discovery for a test to identify future Alzheimer’s sufferers, it was a big step along the way.
Alzheimer’s is the most common form of dementia — a brain-wasting condition that affects around 35 million people around the world — and despite decades of research, doctors still have few effective weapons against it. Drugs can relieve some of the symptoms for a while, but patients gradually lose their memories, their ability to navigate and understand the world, and to care for themselves. This research team used a technique called proteomics, which analyses proteins, to conduct two “discovery phase” studies in 95 patients and found that clusterin appeared to be linked with the early signs of Alzheimer’s.
The findings were published in the Archives of General Psychiatry journal. “We found that this clusterin protein was increased in blood as much as 10 years before people had the signs of Alzheimer’s disease in their brains,” said Simon Lovestone, who led the study.
“And even when they had signs of disease in their brains, they still had no clinical signs of the disorder — so this suggests that this is a really, really early change that occurs in people who are going to get the disease.” Lovestone said it was important to stress there was still a lot more work to do before a test could be used by doctors in clinics, but said such a technique may in future become part of a range of tests to find people with early signs of the disease.
The number of dementia sufferers is expected to balloon in future decades as populations around the world age. Alzheimer’s Disease International predicts numbers will almost double every 20 years to 66 million in 2030 and over 115 million in 2050.