Alzheimer's Disease Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Alzheimer's Disease, including details on diagnosis, memory loss, heredity, treatment, medication.

Cerebrospinal fluid tau and beta-amyloid in Alzheimer patients, disease controls and an age-matched random sample.

Ibach B, Binder H, Dragon M, Poljansky S, Haen E, Schmitz E, Koch H, Putzhammer A, Kluenemann H, Wieland W, Hajak G

Department of Psychiatry, Psychosomatics and Psychotherapy, Geriatric Psychiatry Research Group, University of Regensburg at the Bezirksklinikum, Universitätsstrasse 84, D-93053 Regensburg, Germany. bernd.ibach@klinik.uni-regensburg.de

We prospectively evaluated the diagnostic accuracy of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF)-beta-amyloid1-42 (Abeta42), -total-tau (tau) and -phosphorylated-tau181 (p-tau181) as measured by sandwich ELISAs in the clinical routine of a community state hospital to discriminate between patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD), healthy controls (HC), non-AD-dementias, a group composed of various psychiatric disorders (non-AD-dementias, mental diseases) and an age-matched random sample (RS) (total N=219). By comparing patients with AD to HC as reference, tau revealed sensitivity (sens)/specificity (spec) of 88%/80%, p-tau(181) 88%/80%, tau/Abeta42-ratio 81%/85% and phospho-tau(181)/Abeta42-ratio 81%/78%. Discriminative power between HC and all dementias under investigation was estimated lower for tau (78%/77%) and p-tau(181) (73%/79%). Relative to patients with AD, ROC analysis for the RS revealed highest sens/spec for p-tau181 (79%/77%) and p-tau181/Abeta42 ratio (78%/75%). Differentiation between AD versus a group made of patients with various psychiatric disorders was optimised by using CSF-p-tau181 (80%/77%). Under clinical routine conditions current CSF-biomarkers show a substantial capacity to discriminate between AD and HC as reference and to mark off AD patients from RS and heterogeneous diagnostic groups composed of non-AD dementias and other psychiatric conditions. Despite a residual substantial overlap between the groups, we conclude that current CSF markers are well suited to support AD-related diagnostic procedures in every-day clinics.

Published 24 July 2006 in Neurobiol Aging, 27(9): 1202-11.
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