Scientific Calendar January 2025

Neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease (AD) are the leading cause of dementia and impose immense social and economic costs on society. There are currently an estimated 50 million people living with dementia worldwide, and this number is expected to rise to over 80 million by 2030.

On clinical grounds alone, the differential diagnosis of AD can prove challenging even for dementia experts. Accurate prognosis and disease monitoring is also difficult when relying exclusively on clinical information.

Therefore, biomarkers reflecting the classic pathophysiological features of AD (amyloid β [Aβ], tau and neurodegeneration) are currently detected using either cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) or imaging techniques (positron emission tomography – PET measurements).¹

The established CSF and PET analyses have excellent diagnostic properties. Both can identify early AD with high accuracy (AUC 0.92 – 0.94).² But they are less useful outside very specialised clinics due to their limited accessibility, invasiveness (e.g., CSF analyses require a lumbar puncture, and PET requires infusion of stable isotopes and exposure to radiation), contraindications (e.g., anticoagulant medication might prohibit lumbar puncture) and high costs (PET is expensive and not universally covered by health insurance).³

Thus, there is an important medical need to identify cost-effective biomarkers that can be more easily obtained in a less invasive manner, and that can be serially measured. It is very likely that blood-based biomarkers will fulfil this need.⁴

With the help of highly sensitive procedures such as with the Sysmex HISCL immunoassay analyser, biomarkers for early AD detection can now be measured from blood samples. The so-called ‘b-Amyloid 1-42/1-40’ ratio – measured on the HISCL analyser – showed a very high diagnostic performance compared to amyloid PET (AUC 0.90).⁵ The HISCL b-Amyloid 1-42 and 1-40 assays are also the first (CE-IVD) immunoassay blood tests that have been released for routine diagnostics which makes them available for introduction and use in clinical practice.