The advancements in the last just 10 years in blood biomarkers for neurodegenerative disease have been amazing. We have new blood tests for Alzheimer’s on the market. We have seeding assays for alpha-synuclein now that are looking really good with newer things coming that will be earlier detection even for Parkinson’s. There’s work now showing biomarkers discriminating Parkinson’s from Lewy bodies, from other dementias...
The advancements in the last just 10 years in blood biomarkers for neurodegenerative disease have been amazing. We have new blood tests for Alzheimer’s on the market. We have seeding assays for alpha-synuclein now that are looking really good with newer things coming that will be earlier detection even for Parkinson’s. There’s work now showing biomarkers discriminating Parkinson’s from Lewy bodies, from other dementias. So it’s super exciting. My biggest charge these days and where I’m focusing a lot of my attention is how do we integrate this into primary care? The primary care physicians, nurses, et cetera, unfortunately, have largely been left out of the discussions and considerations. We as a field obviously understand neuro diseases and building the biomarkers. Now the field is starting to take the time and say, let’s figure out how do we integrate this into primary care. And that requires a ton of education. There’s a lot of educational materials out there. At this point, whether we realize it or not, those materials are not broadly making it to primary care docs, and they’re not making it into the community. I speak in the community all the time and am getting these questions of, wait, there’s a blood test available, or there’s a new drug, and the community and the docs oftentimes are surprised at what we need as a field. And this I don’t think is specific to any neuro space. Primary care doctors’ time with patients is approximately 15 minutes. So we need systems that facilitate how can they implement what they need in a very rapid manner that doesn’t take up too much of their time because they simply don’t have it. And they can’t just refer because of the 6, 12, 18 month wait list and many of their patients don’t even have access. Most patients with neurodegenerative diseases never see a specialist. So we need to spend more time building the systems that meet the primary care docs’ needs. But we also have to educate the nurses, the staff, the social workers. And we need to educate the community because a lot of times primary care docs will say, I learned so much just from my patients because they are reading this and reading that and they bring it to me. We need to embrace that process and build a system that is more readily advanceable and I guess enter a system that actually works for the primary care docs, the nurse practitioners, the PAs, the nurses, et cetera. So we’ve got amazing advancements. Now we have to figure out how to get them there because they’re just not there yet, but we can do that.
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