According to the Alzheimer's Association, early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease improves your chances of benefiting from treatment.

But getting that diagnosis can be costly and time consuming.

That's why researchers at UNLV are so excited about a new blood test to help diagnose the disease.

Those researchers provided data that helped earn FDA approval of the test last year, and Nevada Week spoke with them about the breakthrough in this month's "Your Brain Health Matters."

♪♪ (Dr.

Jeffrey Cummings) For me, I looked at it and I said, this changes the world.

Because until now, the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease has been just based on clinical interview, which is often wrong or very expensive brain scans.

And all of a sudden we had a blood test for Alzheimer's disease.

And that would have been unimaginable even five years ago.

And I think an important aspect of this is it's approved for people who have symptoms that are consistent with Alzheimer's disease.

So somebody who is 65 years old and feels like their memory is failing or their spouse thinks that their memory is failing, that's the appropriate candidate for this, for this blood test.

So it has a reasonably specific indication of people who have beginning mild symptoms, and they are also the ones who are candidates for the new treatments.

So there's a very important relationship between the blood test and the availability of the new treatments.

-The candidates you are talking about, how likely is it that they are going to their doctors and being prescribed to take this test?

Or is that a year down the road, years down the road, where that becomes commonplace?

(Dr.

Jefferson Kinney) Yeah.

I think that it's starting to happen now and is going to steadily increase.

As news of its approval came out, there's a lot of physicians that are trying to determine how and when to use it.

But I think over time, we're going to see a really, really large increase.

-And I think it's important to say that it's slow to change behavior in a healthcare system.

So it will be a while before this becomes a routine part of practice in the way that it should be.

And there's also still some clarification that's needed on the reimbursement for the test.

It's so new that we don't know exactly how CMS is going to reimburse it, that is Medicare, and we don't know how insurance companies are going to regard it.

-What can speed that process up?

-Information about what the test can do, information about how it can be used, and the adoption.

The more that the research community advances the information about this, the better.

But it's really going to come, as Dr.

Cummings highlighted, it's going to come down to how readily are people going to deploy it in their clinical practice?

-And I think the educational strategies, like the one we're doing right now with Vegas PBS, is so important because we have to get the word out, both to families and to early patients and to their doctors so that this becomes a part of the conversation of what health care of older individuals is about.

-Well, and that's what I was wondering.

If there's someone watching at home who thinks their parent perhaps could use this test, do they need to go to that doctor themselves and say, Hey, are you making this available?

How can we get this test?

Would that help?

-Absolutely, yes.

That's really what we need, because we know that the doctors are so busy and they're being asked to do so many things, that the patient has to be their own advocate.

And advocating for this blood test is an important part of the health care interchange for someone who has a memory impairment.

-Can you describe the physical process of this test?

-Yeah.

So everybody goes to their physician every year, hopefully, and they have a blood draw done.

And it's simply taking the blood that's drawn normally by a physician, and it goes through about three different processing steps and then directly into a well-established protocol.

And what comes out is basically a reading on two plasma-based biomarkers, which is just a fancy way of seeing two targets that are in the blood and the amount that's there.

And those two put together equals a score.

And where that score lands equals positive for Alzheimer's disease, negative in a very small indeterminate zone that needs a little bit more testing.

But it's very, very straightforward.

It's very cost-effective, and probably its best feature is that hundreds can be done in a day, as opposed to other methods that preceded this that it took long durations to get a test scheduled.

It took a long time for the processing.

This is very quick, very rapid, and very deployable.

-And then what happens once someone is found to be positive for Alzheimer's?

-I think at that point the interaction is to begin discussing the treatment options and what would be required for these treatments.

The new treatments that we have for patients with early disease are complicated, and they require confirmation with MRI beyond the blood test, for example.

And so the patient has to be willing, and the family has to be willing to enter the therapeutic contract.

And so that discussion begins at the time that the blood test is positive.

So that's the start of the journey that the patient might be on for therapy.

-Down the road, could someone get this test without being 65 years old, just for their own sake to know?

Do you foresee it getting that advanced to be able to predict far ahead?

-Well, I think that's our dream, that someone would come in and get an annual blood test, probably beginning around age 50, and if it changed and we know that the blood test changes before the patient gets symptoms.

So at that point, we hope to have drugs available that will be able to prevent the emergence of Alzheimer's disease.

Right now we have drugs to treat Alzheimer's disease, but not to prevent the occurrence of the symptoms of the disease.

But we're working on that already.

So what we want is to have the test administered, to have the therapy administered, and for people never to have Alzheimer's disease.

-Dr.

Cummings says he hopes the blood tests will get patients into clinical trials quicker and at a lower cost.

He says a scan for Alzheimer's can cost $6,000; whereas, a blood test can cost between $300 and $500.

To watch more from our series, "Your Brain Health Matters," go to our website, vegaspbs.org/nevadaweek.