Researchers Make Progress toward Alzheimer’s Blood Test

Renew Senior Communities’ CEO Lee Tuchfarber oversees strategic growth for the company’s senior housing complexes in Glenwood Springs and Aurora, CO. To ensure that all residents are provided with the best care, Lee Tuchfarber and his team base their programming and health care on the latest research.

Limitations in Alzheimer’s disease testing methods have made diagnosing the disease and differentiating it from other neurodegenerative disorders difficult for medical providers and researchers. Current protocols are expensive and invasive. For this reason, researchers have devoted considerable resources to the development of a blood test that can identify proteins associated with Alzheimer’s.

In 2020, studies in the United States and Sweden found that a blood test for a protein known as p-tau217 can predict Alzheimer’s with more than 95 percent accuracy nearly two decades before any symptoms appear. While more research is needed, these blood tests may one day help doctors diagnose patients earlier and create treatment plans to delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.