Could new blood tests give people living with Alzheimer’s enough time to improve their prognosis? 

What if a new way to test for Alzheimer’s gave underserved communities more time to make lifestyle changes — and delay the onset of cognitive decline?

The Asia-Pacific region is ageing faster than any other region on earth¹. With age comes the risk of neurodegeneration: between 1990 and 2021 the prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias soared by 250%. Mortality has risen by nearly 300%. DALYs (Disability-Adjusted Life-Years — years lived with disability + years of life lost) have risen by 250%².

Our health systems were designed for acute care, not rapidly rising chronic disease. Without intervention, Alzheimer’s disease will place unsustainable strain on health budgets across the entire region.

Early detection is key to slowing cognitive decline 

Alzheimer’s Disease isn’t believed to be preventable — but neurodegeneration can often be slowed down with lifestyle changes. Exercise, improved diet, smoking cessation and social interaction can all help to protect against cognitive decline. That requires early detection. 

The problem is that most diagnoses come too late. 75% of people living with dementia globally receive no formal diagnosis at all³; the minority who do are then faced with an obstacle course of health system access barriers. Patients frequently face wait times of up to two years for diagnostics³, navigating complex, expensive and/or invasive tools like PET scans and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) testing.

This infrastructure is usually centralised in high-resource, urban hospitals and often involve high out of pocket costs — leaving testing out of reach for remote and lower income communities. These groups are significantly and disproportionately affected by lack of access to diagnostic care: families are left without answers until the disease has significantly progressed and the window for effective intervention is missed.

Blood-based biomarkers improve access and equity  

Alzheimer’s begins with no symptoms and often progresses slowly over a decade or more before symptoms appear³. The changes to the brain are, however, identifiable early in the prognosis: by the accumulation of beta-amyloid and tau proteins². These pathobiological “footprints” — known as amyloid plaques and tau tangles — can emerge years before clinical symptoms become apparent. 

And new blood tests can identify the presence of these biomarkers. They can detect amyloid and tau proteins even at low concentrations in the bloodstream. 

Unlike PET scans and CSF testing, which require specialised facilities often limited to major urban centres, blood-based biomarkers can be analysed using standard, high-throughput laboratory infrastructure already present in many community hospitals.

This decentralisation allows testing to move from tertiary neurology clinics into community-based primary care settings. For the Asia-Pacific region’s geographically fragmented landscapes — like Indonesia’s archipelagos or remote communities in China and Australia — this reduces the need for patients to travel long distances for initial screening.

And by serving as a triage tool to identify patients unlikely to have the disease, blood blood tests significantly reduce the financial burden on health systems by ensuring only high-probability patients proceed to resource-heavy imaging.

Diagnostic innovation empowers underserved communities 

Alzheimer’s is a complex, difficult, degenerative disease. People living with Alzheimer’s in underserved communities find that the odds are stacked against them. But if we can give them access to more equitable testing — delivering life-changing diagnostics in community settings — we can give them a fighting chance. We can make sure their geography no longer dictates their ability to spend more of their lives in good health.