LAUSR

Affordable and accessible tools could be used for screening and therapy monitoring Alzheimer's disease (AD) is characterized by brain protein aggregates of amyloid-β (Aβ) and phosphorylated tau (pTau) that become plaques and tangles, and dystrophic neurites surrounding the plaques, which are accompanied by downstream neurodegeneration. These protein changes can be used as biomarkers detected through positron emission tomography (PET) imaging and in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), allowing for ATN (amyloid, tau, and neurodegeneration) classification of patients. This phenotyping has become standard in AD clinical trials to overcome the high misclassification rate (20 to 30%) for clinical criteria and also enables enrollment of preclinical AD patients. The recent approval of the first disease-modifying anti-amyloid immunotherapy, aducanumab, for AD will generate a need for widely accessible and inexpensive biomarkers for ATN classification of patients with cognitive complaints. Technological advances have also overcome the challenges of measuring the extraordinarily low amounts of brain-derived proteins in blood samples, and recent studies indicate that AD blood tests may soon be possible.