Alzheimer’s Blood Test Predicts Who Might Benefit Most From Anti-Amyloid Drugs
Plasma phosphorylated tau 217 (p-tau217) outperformed p-tau181, p-tau231, and other blood-based biomarkers to identify which patients might benefit most from anti-amyloid Alzheimer’s drugs, a cohort study showed. Plasma p-tau217 helped rule out two groups who would not likely benefit: those who were amyloid-negative, and those who were amyloid-positive but had a high tau burden, reported […]
Direct-to-Consumer Lab Tests Raise Ethical Questions, Researchers Say
Direct-to-consumer (DTC) laboratory tests — for the thyroid, hormonal biomarkers, or diabetes and hemoglobin A1c, for example — often had unclear terms of sale and vague privacy policies, a qualitative study showed. Of 21 U.S. companies that offered DTC lab tests, less than half declared compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), […]
Discordant Biomarkers Foretell Prognosis in Oropharyngeal Cancer
Mismatch between the p16 protein and human papillomavirus (HPV) biomarkers can help determine prognosis in patients with oropharyngeal cancer, European researchers reported. Specifically, oropharyngeal cancer patients with discordance between the p16 (p16INK4a ) and HPV biomarker had significantly worse disease-free survival (DFS) and overall survival (OS) than double-positive patients, though significantly better survival than double-negative […]
New biomarkers for coffee consumption
In search of new biomarkers for nutrition and health studies, a research team from the Leibniz Institute for Food Systems Biology at the Technical University of Munich (LSB) has identified and structurally characterized three metabolites that could be considered as specific markers for individual coffee consumption. These are degradation products of a group of substances […]
Blood-Based Biomarkers Prove Mettle in Liver Disease Diagnosis
Multiple noninvasive blood biomarkers for metabolic liver disease met accuracy assessments for diagnosing metabolic liver disease in the first step of an advanced qualification system to better utilize these noninvasive tools, a researcher said. Top-line analyses of the Non-Invasive Biomarkers of Metabolic Liver Disease (NIMBLE) Stage 1 initiative found high sensitivity and specificity for the […]
Early accumulation of tau in the brain predicts memory decline in Alzheimer’s disease
Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have compared how well different Alzheimer’s biomarkers predict the progression of the disease and its effect on the memory. They found that early accumulation of tau proteins in the brain as measured by PET scanner was more effective at predicting memory impairment than biomarkers in the cerebrospinal fluid or […]