“Our new digital test provides a first objective picture – at an earlier stage and with greater precision – of which patients have cognitive impairment indicative of Alzheimer’s disease. This indicates who should proceed with the blood test that measures the level of phosphorylated tau and is able to detect Alzheimer’s pathology in the brain with high accuracy,” says Pontus Tideman, doctoral student in the research group, Clinical Memory Research at Lund University and psychologist at the Memory Clinic, Skåne University Hospital to Lund University.

At the moment, these blood tests are only available in specialized clinics/memory clinics in hospitals. In the long term, they will also be available in primary care, but doing blood tests on all patients presenting with cognitive problems is not the intention, describes the scientists.

Digital tools could be of great benefit

They believe that the digital tool could be of great benefit, as it is currently very challenging to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease during a 15 to 20-minute patient encounter.

“The unique aspect of our BioCog test is that unlike other digital tests, it has been evaluated in a primary care population, i.e. patients seeking treatment at a health centre because they are experiencing cognitive problems, such as memory problems. Combining the results of the digital test and the blood test increases the accuracy of diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease. The purpose of the test is to make things easier for primary care doctors,” says Linda Karlsson, MSc in engineering physics and doctoral student in the research group, Clinical Memory Research at Lund University.

learn more about the new test here