Abstract
There is an urgent need for biomarkers to enable early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD). It has recently been shown that a variant within the clusterin gene is associated with increased risk of AD and plasma levels of clusterin have been found to be associated with the risk of AD. We, therefore, investigated the diagnostic value of clusterin by quantifying clusterin using an ELISA in plasma from 171 controls, 127 patients with AD, 82 patients with other dementias and 30 patients with depression. We observed similar plasma clusterin levels in controls, AD patients and patients with other dementias, suggesting that plasma clusterin levels have no diagnostic value for AD. There was a slight, but significant, increase in plasma clusterin in patients with depression compared to all other groups tested, which may warrant further investigation.
Publication types
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Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
MeSH terms
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Adult
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Aged
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Alzheimer Disease / blood*
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Alzheimer Disease / genetics
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Alzheimer Disease / metabolism
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Biomarkers / blood
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Biomarkers / metabolism
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Clusterin / blood*
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Dementia / blood
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Dementia / diagnosis
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Depression / blood
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Depression / diagnosis
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Disease Progression
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Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay / methods
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Female
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Gene Expression Profiling
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Gene Expression Regulation*
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Humans
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Inflammation
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Male
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Middle Aged
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Risk
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Sweden
Grants and funding
This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council; the Regional Agreement on Medical Training and Clinical Research between Skåne County Council and Lund University and the Torsten and Ragnar Söderberg Foundation; and Bagadilico (
http://www.med.lu.se/bagadilico). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.