Blood biomarkers for Alzheimers disease: guidance on appropriate testing from the Association of British Neurologists and Royal College of Psychiatrists

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23 Oct 2026 0 comments

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is associated with neuropathological changes of amyloid beta plaques and neurofibrillary tangles composed of hyperphosphorylated tau, the presence of which can now be reliably reflected by plasma markers.1 While there is research interest in detecting AD before symptom onset, in clinical practice, and for the purposes of this paper, we consider it to require the presence of progressive and demonstrable cognitive decline, usually but not always involving episodic memory. In this context, AD diagnosis has been historically made via a combination of clinical assessment and structural neuroimaging, although with only modest accuracy of this approach for predicting neuropathological findings at postmortem (eg, around 70% accurate).2 In practice, imperfect specificity means that some people labelled clinically as AD will have non-AD pathologies, including conditions with distinct management implications and sometimes more modifiable contributors such as cerebrovascular disease, mood disorders or obstructive sleep apnoea....