May 29, 2018
Dementia is a devastating disease with a huge global impact. Today, over 46 million people live with dementia worldwide. It is possible that promising treatments for Alzheimer’s disease have failed thus far because treatment was started at a late stage of the disease process. So, early treatment could be beneficial, but how do you recognize a patient with Alzheimer’s disease if he or she does not present with clinical symptoms? This is a key question, and presents an enormous opportunity for laboratory test based on biological markers of ongoing brain pathology. One example is measurement of neurogranin, a protein in cerebrospinal fluid that correlates with cognitive decline and is a potential novel biomarker for Alzheimer’s disease dementia. There are multiple antibody-based neurogranin assays, which all target different segments of the protein. An original article in the June 2018 issue of Clinical Chemistry compared the analytical and the diagnostic performance of three commonly used neurogranin assays on the same cohort of patients.