So blood biomarkers are increasingly available in clinical practice, not only to memory specialists like me, but also to primary care providers. And we’re finding that more and more patients are arriving in memory clinics already having had these blood tests. So in some ways, this is good because we already know a fair amount about the patient and whether they have Alzheimer’s disease pathology but sometimes there’s a lack of clarity about what the results are and what they mean; we have to perform additional tests...
So blood biomarkers are increasingly available in clinical practice, not only to memory specialists like me, but also to primary care providers. And we’re finding that more and more patients are arriving in memory clinics already having had these blood tests. So in some ways, this is good because we already know a fair amount about the patient and whether they have Alzheimer’s disease pathology but sometimes there’s a lack of clarity about what the results are and what they mean; we have to perform additional tests. So it’s really wonderful that we have these tools, but really the challenge right now is implementation, and to get all of the different clinicians, both memory specialists and primary care providers, to order the most accurate tests, which are P-tau217-based tests, and to interpret them appropriately, which is that they tell you whether someone has Alzheimer’s disease pathology in their brain, but they may not tell you whether that pathology is the primary cause of cognitive impairment or whether there are other conditions that are co-occurring that may also be either the primary cause or contributing to cognitive impairment. So it’s very important that clinicians continue to consider the full clinical picture and all the various conditions that may be contributing to cognitive impairment and not attribute all cognitive impairment to Alzheimer’s disease simply because one blood biomarker test is positive.
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