Alzheimer’s is a brain disorder that primarily affects adults aged 65 and older. It’s the most common cause of dementia and leads to the gradual decline of memory and thinking skills. It’s progressive, meaning the symptoms worsen over time. Early symptoms include memory loss and other cognitive issues that would typically be evaluated with a mental status test.
If the mental status evaluation determines that cognitive impairment is present, the next steps in the diagnostic process have traditionally been:
- Brain imaging tests
- Cerebrospinal fluid tests
While these tests may still be performed to rule out other conditions such as stroke or a brain mass, the Lumipusle test is a simple blood draw which looks for two specific proteins that build up in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s: beta-amyloid and phosphorylated tau proteins. The detection of these proteins correlates with the presence of amyloid plaques in a person’s brain, which causes the decline of healthy brain cells and is a key sign of Alzheimer’s.
If your eyes glazed over while reading that, bear with us.
Imagine your brain as busy interconnected roads and highways. In a healthy brain, the vehicles run smoothly on those roads, successfully carrying information, memories, thoughts, and emotions. In a brain with Alzheimer’s, debris (beta-amyloid) begins to build up on the road, causing impassable traffic jams (amyloid plaques), making it difficult for information to successfully travel through the brain. Simultaneously, the actual infrastructure of the roads (tau proteins) begins to collapse and becomes tangled into a mess.
Think of the blood test as a GPS system alerting you to major traffic jams on your route.
ARUP Laboratories, the University of Utah’s blood bank and laboratory partner, has developed their own blood test, though it has not been cleared by the FDA yet. Like the Lumipulse test, this is a simple blood draw that can identify phosphorylated tau proteins, which correlates with the presence of amyloid plaques and therefore the potential for Alzheimer’s. In other words, the support beams (tau proteins) of a highway become so damaged (phosphorylation) that they collapse, pile up, and cause major traffic jams (amyloid plaques).