Tallaght Hospital doctor wins top award for research into the diagnosis of early Alzheimer’s disease
October 8, 2024
An Irish doctor has won a European award for research paving the way for improvements in the detection of Alzheimer’s disease.
Dr Adam Dyer is a specialist registrar in geriatric medicine and a clinical academic training fellow at Tallaght University Hospital (TUH) and Trinity College Dublin.
He has just received a major European award for research at the Institute of Memory and Cognition at TUH which has important implications for the detection of early Alzheimer’s disease.
His research showed it is possible to use a blood test to detect “proteins” that build up in the brain of individuals with Alzheimer’s disease.
The Stefania Maggi Award was awarded to him at the 20th European Geriatric Medicine Conference in Valencia, Spain. Dr Dyer is the first Irish recipient of the award.
“I work with the memory assessment support service where people come in with early cognitive symptoms like memory, visual problems, problems with language,” Dr Dyer told the Irish Independent..
“The research comes in when someone has a lumbar puncture which is a procedure where we take a sample of their spinal flu, take fluid, and we send it off to the clinical lab and test it for the different proteins and changes that you see in Alzheimer’s disease.
“We have been asking people who are having that procedure performed if they would mind us taking samples for research at the same time.
“We take a bit of extra spinal fluid and store that in the biobank and then we take blood samples as well. We process them on site, and we store them long term.”
It is hoped this will reduce the need for some future patients to have more invasive procedures such as a lumbar puncture, also known as a spinal tap, to confirm the presence of these proteins.
Currently, only a lumbar puncture test can detect “amyloid” protein which builds-up in the brain of individuals with early Alzheimer’s disease.
Dr Dyer said the performance of a new blood test – to detect amyloid, one of the proteins that make-up “plaques” in the brains of people with early Alzheimer’s disease – “looks promising”.
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