The grant supports a critical research project focused on blood-based biomarkers to help predict who will progress from mild cognitive impairment to dementia due to Alzheimer’s disease (AD).
Availability of AD blood-based biomarkers will have significant impact in patient diagnosis and treatment with disease modifying therapies. Blood based biomarkers represent noninvasive and more widely available and cost-effective tool for diagnosis of AD pathology. However, the performance of current blood-based biomarkers assays needs to be evaluated in diverse community-based cohorts that are more representative of the populations in which these biomarkers will be clinically used. The evaluation of these assays is needed to identify which are the most accurate assays to predict the presence of amyloid pathology and the progression from mild cognitive impairment to dementia due to AD. This study will evaluate the performance of two phosphorylated Tau (pTau) assays to identify individuals with an abnormal amyloid PET. The tests will be performed on 500-800 samples from participants from the Mayo Clinic Study of Aging and the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center with a pTau assay by C2N diagnostics and with pTau assay available at Mayo
Clinic Rochester. The goal will be to select the best assay to offer for clinical use and to establish limits for results interpretation.
