Ways toward an early diagnosis in Alzheimer's disease: The Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI)

TLDR

Growing life expectancy increases Alzheimer’s disease incidence and socioeconomic burden, and while advances in pathomechanisms enable targeted therapies, accurate, early diagnosis and reliable monitoring remain essential; no single biomarker fulfills all needs, but combining neuroimaging, CSF, and blood markers may improve early, accurate diagnosis. The ADNI study seeks to determine which combinations of neuroimaging, CSF, and blood biomarkers most effectively diagnose AD and monitor treatment effects. It does this by systematically evaluating these biomarker combinations within the ADNI framework.

Abstract

Abstract With the increasing life expectancy in developed countries, the incidence of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and thus its socioeconomic impact are growing. Increasing knowledge over the last years about the pathomechanisms involved in AD allow for the development of specific treatment strategies aimed at slowing down or even preventing neuronal death in AD. However, this requires also that (1) AD can be diagnosed with high accuracy, because non‐AD dementias would not benefit from an AD‐specific treatment; (2) AD can be diagnosed in very early stages when any intervention would be most effective; and (3) treatment efficacy can be reliably and meaningfully monitored. Although there currently is no ideal biomarker that would fulfill all these requirements, there is increasing evidence that a combination of currently existing neuroimaging and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and blood biomarkers can provide important complementary information and thus contribute to a more accurate and earlier diagnosis of AD. The Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) is exploring which combinations of these biomarkers are the most powerful for diagnosis of AD and monitoring of treatment effects.