A new diagnostic technique which may greatly simplify the detection of Alzheimer's disease has been discovered by researchers at McGill University and the affiliated Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research at Montreal's Jewish General Hospital (JGH).
Their results were published June 8 in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease. There is currently no accepted blood test for Alzheimer's, and the diagnosis is usually based on expensive and labour-intensive neurological, neuropsychological and neuroimaging evaluations.
Dr. Hyman Schipper and colleagues at the Lady Davis Institute and McGill University utilized a new minimally-invasive technique called near-infrared (NIR) biospectroscopy to identify changes in the blood plasma of Alzheimer's patients, changes which can be detected very early after onset, and possibly in pre-clinical stages of the disease.
Biospectroscopy is the medical form of spectroscopy, the science of detecting the composition of substances using light or other forms of energy. In NIR spectroscopy, different substances emit or reflect light at specific, detectable wavelengths.