Blood-marker panel separates Alzheimer cases in a single-centre study
A peer-reviewed study in China combined blood markers to distinguish 100 people with established Alzheimer’s disease from 100 healthy controls. Its very high discrimination score comes from internal checks within one centre. The work identifies candidate marker combinations across several biological pathways; it does not establish a screening test for people without symptoms.
Science··Midday
A panel tested in people with established disease
The blood panel brought together signals of nerve-cell injury, tau changes and support for neurons. In a peer-reviewed case-control investigation, the Shanghai Mental Health Center in China recruited 100 people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and 100 cognitively healthy controls between May 2023 and December 2024. Investigators measured twelve markers. The comparison concerns people whose illness was already established, rather than prediction of who develops symptoms later.[1]
Internal checks returned a very high score
For the main statistical model, marker selection occurred inside nested ten-fold cross-validation: separate rounds of training and testing used different portions of the same dataset. Its discrimination score, measured by the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve, reached 0.9999. A second modelling workflow also selected the tau marker pTau217, neurofilament light chain and two nerve-growth factors consistently. Both workflows therefore drew on several biological pathways, while relying on the same participants.[1]
Healthy controls received different imaging checks
Amyloid brain imaging confirmed a key disease feature in the Alzheimer group, but controls did not receive that scan. Silent amyloid accumulation in some controls remains possible. The groups also differed in age, which the analysis considered. Tests used a single laboratory and reagent batch. Independent patient cohorts and other laboratories have yet to establish how well the panel travels beyond this narrowly defined comparison.[1]
