A blood test for dementia may tell you if you have more than one type | The test can help diagnose four neurodegenerative diseases — Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, frontotemporal dementia and dementia with Lewy bodies — based on levels of 15 proteins in the blood.

When something goes wrong in the brain of people with dementia, often it’s more than one thing. But it can be hard to tease apart [multiple brain diseases](https://www.sciencenews.org/article/protein-brain-diseases-blood-parkinsons), especially in the early stages, or even determine if more than one disease is at play. An experimental new blood test may change that.

The test measures the levels of 15 proteins in the blood to help diagnose four major neurodegenerative diseases — Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, frontotemporal dementia and dementia with Lewy bodies. And it can determine if a person has more than one of those diseases with 92.3 percent accuracy, researchers report in the May *Alzheimer’s & Dementia*.

Dementia affects more than [6 million](https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/risk-future-burden-dementia-united-states) people in the United States and is the seventh leading [cause of death](https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/dementia) worldwide. “These diseases are more complex than we initially thought, and there is more overlap than we thought,” says Carlos Cruchaga, a human genomicist at Washington University in St. Louis. “In order to really address and understand the biology of the disease of any of these, we need to study all of these diseases together.”

[Read more here. ](https://www.sciencenews.org/article/experimental-blood-test-dementia-types?utm_source=Reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=rmh)