A blood test for Alzheimer's disease - diagnosis and monitoring.

Dementia is a growing problem with 800,000 people affected in the UK alone. Alzheimer's disease is the most common accounting for 62% of cases. Parkinson' disease is the next most common neurological disorder and subsets of this disease also cause dementia as well. At present there is no simple blood test that can accurately diagnose these different diseases and that causes complications in prescribing the correct treatment and also changing treatments quickly as they stop working. Proteins have been measured in cerebro-spinal fluid but collection is painful, can cause problems and cannot be used as a repeat monitoring diagnostic. Our consortium brings together 3 technologies that allows measurement of these proteins in blood and particularly the aggregated forms which are through to be toxic and cause the nerve damage in the brain. This feasibility study will measure samples from Alzheimer's disease patients and change our understanding of diagnosis of this disease.