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NEURODEGENERATIVE DISEASE

Comorbidities confound Alzheimer’s blood tests

Nature Medicine volume 28, pages 1349–1351 (2022)Cite this article

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The concentrations of two key blood biomarkers for Alzheimer’s disease are affected by some medical conditions, which could potentially lead to misdiagnosis.

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most frequent cause of dementia in older individuals and is defined not by the clinical symptoms but by the presence of amyloid plaques and tau tangles in the brain. Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) biomarkers and amyloid positron emission tomography (PET) tests can accurately detect AD brain pathology, but the perceived risks, costs, and lack of availability of these tests have contributed to a low rate of AD biomarker testing in the clinic.

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Fig. 1

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  • 18 July 2022

    In the version of this article initially published, there was a typo in the last sentence of the third-to-last paragraph, where in the text now reading “an example is the Cockcroft–Gault equation to estimate renal clearance based on serum creatinine concentration, sex, age, weight, and height,” creatinine originally read “creatine.” The change has been made in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Neurology, Washington University School of Medicine, St Louis, MO, USA

    Suzanne E. Schindler

  2. Knight Alzheimer Disease Research Center, Washington University School of Medicine, St Louis, MO, USA

    Suzanne E. Schindler

  3. Clinical Neurochemistry Laboratory, Department of Psychiatry and Neurochemistry, Institute of Neuroscience and Physiology, University of Gothenburg, Mölndal, Sweden

    Thomas K. Karikari

  4. Department of Psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Thomas K. Karikari

Authors
  1. Suzanne E. Schindler
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  2. Thomas K. Karikari
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Suzanne E. Schindler.

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Competing interests

S.E.S. has analysed data on the PrecivityAD blood test provided by C2N Diagnostics. She has not received any research funding or personal compensation from C2N Diagnostics or any other diagnostics or pharmaceutical companies. Washington University may receive royalties from the PrecivityAD blood test. T.K.K. declares no competing interests.

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Schindler, S.E., Karikari, T.K. Comorbidities confound Alzheimer’s blood tests. Nat Med 28, 1349–1351 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-022-01875-3

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