Blog: The Brain Dialogues, filtered by tag: microRNAs

This article was originally published in the The Conversation on 28 July 2016 Anyone who has ever visited a doctor’s office is familiar with the use of blood tests for the diagnosis of various diseases. Because blood comes in contact with all organs of the body, it carries markers of the health of these organs. It is an easily accessible body fluid, can be drawn repeatedly to follow the progress of a disease and, in most cases, blood tests are relatively inexpensive. It is therefore not surprising news that a possible blood test for dementia, in particular Alzheimer’s disease, gets much… Read More

HEIDI DOUGLASS | h.douglass@unsw.edu.au Failure to use a standardised approach is limiting the effectiveness of research into whether microRNAs (miRNAs) can be used as a blood biomarker for Alzheimer’s disease.  Researchers at the Centre for Healthy Brain Ageing (CHeBA) at UNSW Australia conducted a systematic review investigating research into miRNAs as potential biomarkers for early diagnosis and found that few studies assessed the same miRNAs and where they did, methodological differences between the studies made it hard to validate findings. The research, led by CHeBA PhD student Dr… Read More