White blood cells could be key to diagnosing Alzheimer's
Wednesday 25th January 2012
Doctors and those in biomedical science jobs have been continually on the lookout for new ways of identifying and combating the risk of Alzheimer's disease.
Many in the health profession have looked for new ways to spot the initial signs of the condition and a team of researchers in Spain have now found a method of noticing the mental defect. The common identifying process that is currently used involves cerebrospinal fluid, which is found around the brain and spinal column, but this has been deemed to be an invasive technique.
However, the researchers at the Instituto de Estructura de la Materia in Madrid, have found that infra-red radiation that is emitted or absorbed by white blood cells is a far more precise way of spotting the indications of early stages of Alzheimer's. Not only is the method more conclusive but it is also a more cost-effective, quicker and non-invasive technique of spotting the condition.
Due to the high sensitivity of the tests the process can not only spot the early stages of the condition but can also identify at what level the disease has progressed so that doctors can assess what treatments should be administered. However, researchers believe that it should only be used as a method of identifying the first part of Alzhemier's.
In the UK the Alzheimer's Society estimates that one in 14 people suffer from the condition with the risk of getting the disease increasing once a person has reached the age of 80.
Pedro Carmona, lead author of the study, said: "The method we used can potentially offer a more simple detection of alternative biomarkers of Alzheimer's disease. Mononuclear leukocytes seem to offer a stable medium to determine ß-sheet structure levels as a function of disease development. Our measurements seem to be more sensitive for earlier stages of Alzheimer's disease, namely mild and moderate."
Written by Alex Franklin Stortford
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