A new study has found a handful of proteins in blood samples that may predict dementia.

Published Monday in the journal Nature Aging, the study of more than 52,000 adults in the United Kingdom identified four plasma proteins that were consistently associated with the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, vascular dementia and all-cause dementia ten years later.

What You Need To Know

  • A handful of blood proteins may be able to predict dementia

  • A study published in Nature Aging compared frozen blood samples from 52,000 adults without dementia to follow-up tests 14 years later

  • Individuals with high levels of GFAP were 2.32 times more likely to develop dementia 

  • The National Institutes of Health said last year there is increasing evidence that GFAP can be used to detect early stages of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's

The study is based on frozen blood samples taken from adults without dementia between 2006 and 2010 and comparing them with follow-up tests 14 years later. Almost 3% of adults whose blood was tested had developed dementia by the time of the follow-up test. Of those with dementia, most had the plasma proteins GFAP, NEFL, GDF15 or LTBP2 in the earlier test.

The study found that individuals with high GFAP levels were 2.32 times more likely to develop dementia.

“Our findings strongly highlight GFAP as an optimal biomarker for dementia prediction, even more than 10 years before the diagnosis, with implications for screening people at high risk for dementia and for early intervention,” the researchers noted in their abstract.

The National Institutes of Health said last year there is increasing evidence that GFAP, or glial fibrillary acidic protein, can be used to detect the early stages of neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. The NIH has also found high GFAP levels in ischemic stroke patients.

Last month, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that a commercially available blood test for another key biomarker of Alzheimer’s — p-tau217 — was as accurate as one using a more invasive cereobrospinal fluid test or brain scan.

The NIH found the buildup of p-tau217 in the blood indicates the manifestation and progression of Alzheimer’s disease, which leads to brain atrophy and physical degradation.

Various companies are working on a simple commercially available blood test that can identify people who may be at risk of developing dementia by testing for biomarkers such as p-tau217 and GFAP.

About 5.8 million people in the United States have Alzheimer’s disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The most common type of dementia, Alzheimer’s, is expected to affect 14 million Americans by 2060.