There are many different forms of dementia, but Alzheimer's disease is the most prevalent and covers 50% to 70% of all dementia cases. At the moment there is no cure and no definite known cause. A new EU-funded project, PredictAD, is now underway; its mission is to develop diagnostic tools to predict Alzheimer's as early as possible.

Alzheimer's disease affects more than 5 million people in Europe and more than 24 million worldwide. There are also predictions that the disease will double every 20 years. Alzheimer's generally affects people over 65 years of age and has a distressing panoply of symptoms, beginning with memory loss and often leading, usually over a period of months or years to outbursts of anger, hostility, mood swings, withdrawal from family and friends, and finally to loss of bodily functions and death.

There is currently no treatment that can cure Alzheimer's. However, new drug treatments are coming on to the market all the time, and an early diagnosis could mean hope for sufferers to be cured at an early stage before symptoms become too pronounced.

The focus of current research is on the development of tools for early diagnosis. At the moment there is no single test that can predict if a person has early symptoms of Alzheimer's or is likely to develop the disease in full in the future. A definite diagnosis can only be made during a post-mortem.

PredictAD, a project with nearly € 3 million of funding and partners in six countries, will attempt to develop indicators that will diagnose Alzheimer's early by studying imaging biomarkers (MRI, PET FDG and PET PIB), measuring electrical brain activity and blood based markers (proteomics and metabolomics) and developing ways of combining data from different biomarkers. A combination of these different types of new information may not only mean a diagnosis of Alzheimer's can be reached earlier, but may help to differentiate between different forms of dementia.

'According to the latest estimates, the global prevalence of Alzheimer's disease is predicted to quadruple to 106 million people by 2050,' says Dr Lennart Thurfjell, head of diagnostic software, medical diagnostics, at GE Healthcare, one of the project partners. 'Thus, there is a critical need for effective diagnostic tools to help in the early diagnosis of this debilitating disease.'

The project is running from June 2008 to May 2011. At a later stage a selected biomarker set will be used to develop a software programme that can be used by doctors to assess the risk of Alzheimer's and to monitor its progress in patients using patient data.

'The aim of PredictAD is to develop an objective indicator to diagnose Alzheimer's disease at the earliest stage possible,' says Dr Jyrki Lötjönen, the scientific coordinator of PredictAD. 'This may be possible by combining data from various data sources of patient monitoring, such as neuropsychological tests, medical imaging, electrical brain activity measurements, and analysing protein and metabolomics levels of blood samples. Early diagnosis may play an important role in effective medical treatment of Alzheimer's disease, especially in the future as the next generation of therapies becomes available for all patients.'

VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland

Source: Community R&D Information Service (CORDIS)