Abdul Hye at King's College London and his colleagues have identified 10 proteins in blood that can predict who will develop Alzheimer's disease a year after having mild memory problems. The new blood test will initially be used to identify those people with mild cognitive impairment who are likely to get Alzheimer's disease and so might be good candidates for clinical trials to find drugs that halt disease progression. Image copyright SPL Image caption Loss of tissue in a demented brain compared with a healthy one 
 
 Dr Ian Pike, chief operating officer at Proteome Sciences, said: "Having a protein test is really a major step forwards. Feared diagnosis 
 
 "This [blood test] is a technical tour de force," says Eric Karran, director of research at the Alzheimer's Research UK charity. "We want to be able to identify people to enter clinical trials earlier than they currently do and that's really what we've been aiming at," said lead researcher Prof Simon Lovestone from the University of Oxford. Dementia across the globe 44 million globally have dementia 
 
 135 million will have the disease in 2050 
 
 By then 71% will be poor and middle income 
 
 $600bn global cost of dementia 
 
 In the UK, cancer research gets 8x as much funding as dementia Source: Alzheimer's Society 
 
 Blood test 
 
 The research group, which combines university and industry scientists, looked for differences in the blood of 452 healthy people, 220 with mild cognitive impairment and 476 with Alzheimer's disease. A positive result could be backed up by brain scans or testing spinal fluid for signs of Alzheimer's. A further analysis showed that 10 of these proteins could predict whether individuals with mild cognitive impairment would develop Alzheimer's within a year.  Image copyright Thinkstock 
 
 British scientists have made a "major step forward" in developing a blood test to predict the onset of Alzheimer's disease. "This gives a better way to identify people who will progress to Alzheimer's disease, people who can be entered into clinical trials earlier, I think that will increase the potential of a positive drug effect and thereby I think we will get to a therapy, which will be an absolute breakthrough if we can get there. "As long as there is no treatment one can question the value of a test, but people come to the clinic because they want to know what's happening to them and I currently can't tell them." I have to say 'see me in a year and I'll tell you whether you've got dementia or not' – and that's grim.
– Alzheimer's may be well on its way to being a detectable disease by way of a blood test. The BBC reports on the "major step forward": Researchers at King's College London studied differences in the blood of 1,148 people—476 with Alzheimer's, 220 with mild cognitive impairment, and 452 healthy controls. They zeroed in on blood proteins and out of 26, found 10 that were able to predict which patients suffering from mild cognitive impairment would develop Alzheimer's within the year, New Scientist explains. The predictions were 87% accurate. These proteins could help doctors develop a blood test that will identify future sufferers more quickly, with doctors indicating that a current hurdle to treating the disease is that symptoms can take a full decade to appear. Still, there is no cure. But as researcher Simon Lovestone points out, he has no option but to tell patients who are worried about what might be happening to them to come back in a year to see if things are worse. "That's grim," he says. Still, he downplays his findings, published in Alzheimer's & Dementia, a bit: "Lots of blood tests said to be the next big thing haven't come to anything—we have to replicate these results with larger numbers." (March saw the announcement of another potential Alzheimer's blood test that makes use of blood fats.)