Head-to-head comparison of leading blood tests for Alzheimer's disease pathology

Abstract

Introduction: Blood tests have the potential to improve the accuracy of Alzheimer's disease (AD) clinical diagnosis, which will enable greater access to AD-specific treatments. This study compared leading commercial blood tests for amyloid pathology and other AD-related outcomes.

Methods: Plasma samples from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative were assayed with AD blood tests from C2N Diagnostics, Fujirebio Diagnostics, ALZPath, Janssen, Roche Diagnostics, and Quanterix. Outcomes measures were amyloid positron emission tomography (PET), tau PET, cortical thickness, and dementia severity. Logistic regression models assessed the classification accuracies of individual or combined plasma biomarkers for binarized outcomes, and Spearman correlations evaluated continuous relationships between individual plasma biomarkers and continuous outcomes.

Results: Measures of plasma p-tau217, either individually or in combination with other plasma biomarkers, had the strongest relationships with all AD outcomes.

Discussion: This study identified the plasma biomarker analytes and assays that most accurately classified amyloid pathology and other AD-related outcomes.

Highlights: Plasma p-tau217 measures most accurately classified amyloid and tau status. Plasma Aβ42/Aβ40 had relatively low accuracy in classification of amyloid status. Plasma p-tau217 measures had higher correlations with cortical thickness than NfL. Correlations of plasma biomarkers with dementia symptoms were relatively low.

Keywords: A/T/N; amyloid; biomarkers; blood; glial fibrillary acidic protein; neurofilament light; plasma; p‐tau; tau.