blood test tagged posts

A new blood test demonstrated remarkable promise in discriminating between persons with and without Alzheimer’s disease and in persons at known genetic risk may be able to detect the disease as early as 20 years before the onset of cognitive impairment, according to a large international study published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and simultaneously presented at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference.

For many years, the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s has been based on the characterization of amyloid plaques and tau tangles in the brain, typically after a person dies...

Dr Katie Meehan from UWA’s School of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine is leading the project, which is currently recruiting participants with breast cancer.

Researchers at The University of Western Australia are working on a quick, simple and less invasive blood-based test that can detect breast cancer progression or relapse much earlier than current methods such as mammogram, MRI or biopsy. Dr Meehan said through testing before, during and after treatment, the researchers intended to develop a new test that would improve cancer progression, monitoring and health outcomes.
“Women in rural and remote areas would benefit significantly from the new diagnostic blood test to monitor for low levels of residual or recurrent disease,” Dr Meehan said.

“Currently it’s costly, time-consuming and p...