All articles tagged with #biomarker
A long-term study of 2,766 cognitively healthy women found higher blood levels of p-tau217 predict an increased risk of developing dementia or mild cognitive impairment over up to 25 years, suggesting a blood test could help identify those at greatest risk years before symptoms, though it is not deterministic and results vary by race, hormone therapy use, and age; more research is needed before public screening.
A UC San Diego–led study analyzed archived blood samples from the Women’s Health Initiative Memory Study and found that higher levels of the brain protein p-tau217 in cognitively healthy women predicted dementia or mild cognitive impairment up to 25 years later. Published in JAMA Network Open, the finding suggests a simple blood test could identify future dementia risk long before symptoms, enabling earlier lifestyle interventions and more targeted trial recruitment. The study involved only women, with ongoing work to understand modifiable risk factors and whether results apply to men.
A UCSD-led study of 2,766 women in the Women's Health Initiative Memory Study found that higher plasma levels of the brain protein p-tau217 predict future dementia risk in women aged 65–79 up to 25 years before symptoms, with risk variations linked to hormone therapy use and genetic factors.
A UC San Diego study of over 2,500 women found that higher blood levels of the biomarker p-tau217 can predict future dementia risk up to 25 years before symptoms, with stronger links in women over 70, those with Alzheimer’s genetic risk, or on estrogen-progestin therapy; while promising, more studies are needed and it isn’t yet ready for routine clinical use, but could guide prevention trials.
A Nature Medicine study describes a blood test that detects an abnormal form of tau in the blood, which may serve as a molecular clock to predict not only if someone will develop Alzheimer’s but also when symptoms could start. If validated in larger trials, it could enable earlier interventions and streamline clinical testing for therapies, though experts caution that it’s not yet recommended for cognitively unimpaired individuals to use this biomarker outside of research.
The piece explores the idea that routine semen analysis could serve as a broad biomarker for men’s health—potentially a “new Pap smear” that flags risks for metabolic, cardiovascular, and cancer conditions. Startups are offering mail-in and at-home testing to tap a growing market, while medical experts caution that there is insufficient evidence that broad semen screening improves health outcomes, and warn of logistical, ethical, and equity concerns and possible overdiagnosis.
The FDA rejected Disc Medicine's bitopertin for porphyria, citing uncertainties that the biomarker used as the efficacy endpoint may not translate to real patient benefit, marking the first setback for a drug in Commissioner Makary's fast-track review program and sending Disc's shares lower.
The FDA has rejected Regenxbio’s RGX-121 gene therapy for mucopolysaccharidosis type II (Hunter syndrome), citing concerns about the surrogate cerebrospinal fluid biomarker used to predict longer-term cognitive benefit and casting doubt on the accelerated-approval pathway.
University of Geneva researchers find that neutrophils recruited to tumors are reprogrammed to produce the chemokine CCL3, which promotes tumor growth. This shift helps explain why some cancers become more aggressive and points to CCL3 activity in neutrophils as a potential prognostic biomarker and therapeutic target. The team used genetic tools to selectively suppress CCL3 in neutrophils and reanalyzed multiple studies to confirm the link.
A study with 31 participants under propofol anesthesia identifies a distinctive brain-wave pattern and decreasing inter-regional connectivity—especially between the parietal cortex and thalamus and between parietal and occipital areas—that mark loss of consciousness, suggesting an actionable biomarker to refine dosing, though findings are limited to one anesthetic and rely on new methods to infer whole-brain signals from scalp data.
A Brown University-led study using noninvasive magnetoencephalography (MEG) tracked resting brain activity in 85 individuals with mild cognitive impairment and found that those who later developed Alzheimer's showed beta-wave bursts that were shorter, weaker, and less frequent, suggesting a potential early biomarker for progression up to about 2.5 years before diagnosis.
Researchers used AI to identify a new biomarker of chronic stress visible on standard CT scans by measuring adrenal gland size, which correlates with stress levels and predicts cardiovascular risk, offering a practical tool for assessing long-term stress effects in clinical settings.
A study from UNSW Sydney provides strong evidence that hearing voices in schizophrenia may be due to the brain's failure to recognize its own inner speech, with potential implications for early diagnosis and treatment of psychosis.
Scientists in the UK have developed a blood test analyzing epigenetic changes in immune cells that could potentially diagnose chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), offering hope for earlier and more accurate diagnosis, though further research is needed due to the small study size.
Scientists have identified that the protein TSPO, indicating brain inflammation, appears in specific brain regions at the same time as early amyloid-beta plaque formation in Alzheimer's disease, potentially enabling earlier diagnosis and intervention, with findings confirmed in both mouse models and human tissue.