Diagnose It Yourself: Will There Be a Home Test Kit for Alzheimer’s disease?

Abstract

Alzheimer’s disease is the most common neurodegenerative process leading to dementia. To date, there is no curative approach; thus, establishing a diagnosis as early as possible is necessary to implement preventive measures. However, today’s gold standard for diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease is high in both cost and effort and is not readily available. This defines the need for low-effort and economic alternatives that give patients low-threshold access to testing systems at their general practitioners or even at home for an independent retrieval of a biologic specimen. This perspective gives an overview of established and novel approaches in the field and speculates on the future of test strategies eventually technically implementable at home.

Pain-Free Alpha-Synuclein Detection by Low-Cost Hierarchical Nanowire Based Electrode

“…Therefore, a point-of-care (POC) biosensor-based method for early diagnosis, even in the preclinical stage, would be highly valuable. Commercially available determination kits of biomarkers, such as turbidimetric, nephelometric, or enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), have drawbacks like a high cost, being time-consuming and a low sensitivity [ 12 ]. In this scenario, nanomaterial-based electrochemical biosensors show great promise in biomedicine due to their high sensitivity, fast response and cost-effectiveness [ 13 , 14 ].…”