Alberto Lleó, MD, PhD, Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau, Barcelona, Spain, discusses investigational inflammatory and synaptic biomarkers that show promise as tools to aid diagnosis and monitoring in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Synaptic biomarkers may be used to complement the indications of current biomarkers by providing information of disease progression and the speed of cognitive decline in patients. For example, synaptic protein VAMP-2 has recently been reported in patients with Down syndrome (DS) with a clinical AD diagnosis to be a potential cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) biomarker indicative of synaptic degeneration. Dr Lleó reports that VAMP-2 correlates with cognitive performance, as well as other validated CSF AD and axonal degeneration markers, suggesting it has the potential to inform physicians of the cognitive decline that occurs in AD. This interview took place at the Harvard European Alumni Training Network (HEAT-Net) 2021 congress.
