Alzheimer's disease, which damages memory, thinking, learning and organising skills, has long stressed medical researchers. Firstly, its detection is not easy and a person has to go through several tests to determine if they are suffering from his brain disease or are in the early stages of its onset. Moreover, there’s no cure for it, but medications may manage symptoms and slow its progression.

However, a new potential medical breakthrough can help with diagnosing Alzheimer's. A new, international study shows that simple at-home finger-prick blood tests can accurately detect key biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease. If this works out, not only can Alzheimer's detection become cost effective but traditional invasive methods of diagnosis can be avoided in patients.

Alzheimer's disease is usually confirmed through brain scans or spinal fluid tests, which are invasive and expensive. Blood tests that measure biomarkers, such as p-tau217, are emerging as accurate and accessible tools for detecting Alzheimer's disease.

Using the new methods of detection, the same biomarkers doctors use to detect Alzheimer's pathology can be measured from a simple finger prick collected at home. Such tests can be done in remote and less-accessible locations too.

The researchers tested the new method using a few drops of blood obtained from the fingertip and then dried on a card. This process was used to find proteins linked to Alzheimer's disease and other brain changes in the 337 participants across seven European medical centres.

The study found that levels of p-tau217 in finger-prick samples closely matched results from standard blood tests and were able to identify Alzheimer's disease-related changes in spinal fluid with an accuracy of 86 per cent. Two other markers, GFAP and NfL, were also successfully measured and showed strong agreement with traditional tests.

However, these tests are not ready for clinical use yet.