Blood biomarkers: a new frontier in early Alzheimer’s detection in primary and secondary care

Interviewer: Dr. Gemma Salvadó, thank you very much for taking the time to discuss your recent publication in the Journal of the American Medical Association or JAMA on blood biomarkers for the detection of Alzheimer's disease in primary care and secondary care. To kick things off, can you describe the objectives of the study? Dr. Salvadó: Yeah, of course. Thank you very much for having me. The main objective of this study was to assess whether plasma biomarkers could help in the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease pathology in primary and secondary care, meaning in centers that are not primarily specialized in memory clinics. So we wanted to evaluate the accuracy of these blood biomarkers, cerebrospinal fluid biomarkers, and PET imaging to assess the presence of Alzheimer's disease pathology in participants that had cognitive symptoms or cognitive complaints. Interviewer: Can you describe the biomarkers themselves that you tested in the study—that is, I believe, APS2 and the percentage of the phosphorylated tau 217 alone? Dr. Salvadó: The percentage of p-tau217 is a percentage of the phosphorylated versus non-phosphorylated tau at epitope 217 and is related to tau pathology in the brain. APS2 is constructed based on this p-tau 217, but also includes information about the Aβ42 to Aβ40 ratio which is a measure more related to amyloid.