Although there aren’t any reliable treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, being able to diagnose it years before the onset of symptoms would allow the development of new early-term therapies that are currently impossible to even try out. A new device for imaging the eye developed at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center has now been used to effectively screen patients for Alzheimer’s with impressive accuracy.
Being commercialized into a product by NeuroVision Imaging, in the initial group of 40 patients studied, the device had zero false negatives and 81% of those without the disease were confirmed to be so. It’s used to spot retinal beta-amyloid plaque that’s initially stained using curcumin, a part of turmeric, without having to take any samples from fragile parts of the nervous system. The researchers believe that because of the early deposition of beta-amyloid plaque within the retina, the test may be able to spot Alzheimer’s up to 20 years before a clinical diagnosis.
Press release: Study of noninvasive retinal imaging device presented at Alzheimer’s conference…
Link: NeuroVision Imaging…