Q2. What is the importance of an early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease?
An early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and other types of dementia-causing disorders is vital in order to achieve effective treatments.
Q3. What is the possible presence of a potential biomarker?
It is also possible the presence of high intra- and inter-person variability due to factors that could influence the levels of a potential biomarker.
Q4. What are the common approaches to evaluate a broad range of proteins?
Unbiased approaches have been pursued to evaluate a broad range of proteins (proteomics), small molecule metabolites (metabolomics), or transcripts (transcriptomics) in blood.
Q5. What are the main factors that need to be considered when designing future studies?
However some considerations need to be taken into account when designing future studies, including the standardization of CSF extraction and the avoidance of factors like blood contamination, CSF gradient effects, and storage differences.
Q6. What is the name of the protein that is associated with AD?
Other proteins present in plasma with recently discovered associations to AD pathology have also been proposed as biomarkers, such ALZAS (ALZheimer ASsociated protein).
Q7. What is the main limitation of proteomic analysis?
the potential use of proteomic analysis of serum or plasma faces increased difficulties in assay standardization, and would require additional multilateral efforts.
Q8. What is the way to differentiate AD from other cognitive disorders?
A model incorporating IL-6 receptor, cysteine, protein fraction α1 and cholesterol levels proved to be the best combination to discriminate AD from controls, although specificity to other cognitive disorders and PD was weaker (Teunissen and Scheltens, 2007).
Q9. What is the estimated incidence of MCI in population studies?
The estimated annual incidence of MCI in population studies is of about 2% in population studies (Larrieu et al., 2002; Palmer et al., 2008) and about 5–9% in clinical samples (Adak et al., 2004; de Leon et al., 2001).
Q10. What is the definition of a transitional state between normal aging and dementia?
Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is often, but not always, a transitional state between normal aging and dementia (Winblad et al., 2004).
Q11. What is the significance of the gene expression profiling in AD?
Another study of AD patients vs. controls identified a group of 20 candidate genes (from 3200 genes investigated) that showed an altered expression in AD (Kalman et al., 2005).
Q12. How long has the transition between MCI and AD been calculated?
The rates of transition between MCI and AD have been calculated between one-third to one-half for the MCIamnestic subtype (Palmer et al., 2008; Petersen et al., 1999) and two-thirds for MCImultidomains subtype over a period of three years.
Q13. What is the recent PET study showing PIB binding in AD patients?
A 2-year longitudinal follow-up showed PIB not significant binding increase in AD patients despite declines in glucose metabolism and cognitive function (Engler et al., 2006).
Q14. What is the way to approach a multifactorial biomarker?
A multifactorial biomarker can be approached in two ways: a “knowledge-based” approach, incorporating “known” putative biomarkers (molecules with known association with the disease); or an unbiased survey of many hundreds or thousands of molecules.
Q15. What is the relationship between A and cardiovascular disease?
Elevated homocysteine is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease (Boushey et al., 1995) but its relation with AD risk is unknown.