WASHINGTON - Scientists appear to have found a fingerprint of Alzheimer’s disease in patients’ spinal fluid, a step toward a long-awaited test for the memory-robbing disease that today can be diagnosed definitively only at autopsy. Researchers at New York’s Weill Cornell Medical College discovered a pattern of 23 proteins floating in spinal fluid that, in very preliminary testing, seems to identify Alzheimer’s - not perfectly, but with pretty good accuracy. Far more research is needed before doctors could try spinal-tap tests in people worried they have Alzheimer’s, specialists caution. But the scientists already are preparing for larger studies to see if this potential ‘biomarker’ of Alzheimer’s holds up. ‘We’re looking to an era in which the kinds of uncertainties that many patients and their families face about the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease will no longer be a problem,’ predicts Dr. Norman Relkin, a neurologist and the study’s senior researcher. Currently, doctors diagnose Alzheimer’s mainly by symptoms. That makes early diagnosis particularly difficult, and even more advanced disease can be confused with other forms of dementia. Nor is there a good way to track the disease’s progression, important for decisions about patient care as well as […]