A little over a year ago, there was a sweet 90 year old woman at a nursing home. Her name was Analisa Caroler. During her stay at this nursing home, she used to tell the most amazing stories of her past. However, a year ago, she began showing signs of Alzheimers. She was shocked. 20 years ago, she discovered she carried a genetic marker for Alzheimers. Because no symptoms ever surfaced before she was 85, her doctors felt that her Alzheimers would never surface. Still, during these 20 years, she never knew if she was going to have Alzheimers or when she was going to begin showing symptoms. This was because she never received a thorough diagnostic test on her Alzheimers disease. Currently ranked as the sixth leading cause of death in the United States alone, Alzheimers disease is a serious condition that arises in someone in the United States every 65 seconds. Roughly 10 percent of adults are diagnosed Alzheimers after the age of 65 and at least 32 percent after the age of 80. More so, 25 percent of those originally diagnosed with Alzheimers are misdiagnosed, commonly due to the lack of a full diagnostic report and series of tests. The misdiagnosis is due in full to the insufficiency of appropriate testing for
patients. Alzheimers is a heavily genetically influenced degenerative disease. With Alzheimers, there is one main genetic variant linked to the regression. This is the APOE gene. The APOE gene is responsible for the creation of the class of proteins called the Apolipoprotein. The Apolipoproteins produce proteins that cause the degeneration in the brain. However, detecting the abundance of Apolipoprotein can, currently, only be done two ways: PET scans and Spinal Taps, which are expensive and invasive, causing many patients to be dissuaded of getting a full diagnosis. Targeting the amount of Apolipoprotein from a simple blood sample from a patient to create a new diagnostic test can show the state of the Alzheimers in its degeneration, can be detected by a series of electrophoresis tests on the Alzheimers cell line, and can ease the vexatious uneasiness of those who are unaware of the progression Alzheimers disease in a patient. A full diagnosis of Alzheimers disease is necessary for doctors working on clinical trials, for patients unsure of the state of their disease, and for pharmaceutical companies looking for treatments and can be achieved by targeting the creation of a test that analyzes a patients blood.