Researchers from US learned by analyzing the blood with very high accuracy to predict whether a healthy person can have Alzheimer's disease or other neurodegenerative disorders in the next three years. This is stated in an article published in the journal Nature Medicine.

«Detecting the disease before it occurred, gives us a great chance of timely and adequate intervention in its course. We found signaling molecules, indicating the presence of the disease prior to occuring the first symptoms, which is critical to the development and application of therapies designed to inhibit Alzheimer's, » said Howard Federoff from Georgetown University in Washington DC.

Federoff and his colleagues carried out a five-year experiment with involvement of 500 elderly people about 70 and older. Scientists regularly took blood samples from participants and followed if they had signs of neurodegenerative diseases.

During the first three years of watching researchers had enough data to compare the bloods of elderly people who saved the usual sharpness of mind, and those people who already had Alcheimer's disease by that time. This allowed them to allocate ten phospholipids, phosphorus compounds and fats that are uniquely associated with the development of neurodegenerative disorders.

During the next two years the study authors tried to clarify, whether these compounds are present in human blood prior to occuring the first symptoms of the disease and when does this happen. It turned out that most of them can be detected within 3 years prior to the development of Alzheimer's disease