Plasma phospho-tau217 for Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis in primary and secondary care using a fully automated platform

Abstract

Global implementation of blood tests for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) would be facilitated by easily scalable, cost-effective and accurate tests. In the present study, we evaluated plasma phospho-tau217 (p-tau217) using predefined biomarker cutoffs. The study included 1,767 participants with cognitive symptoms from 4 independent secondary care cohorts in Malmö (Sweden, n = 337), Gothenburg (Sweden, n = 165), Barcelona (Spain, n = 487) and Brescia (Italy, n = 230), and a primary care cohort in Sweden (n = 548). Plasma p-tau217 was primarily measured using the fully automated, commercially available, Lumipulse immunoassay. The primary outcome was AD pathology defined as abnormal cerebrospinal fluid Aβ42:p-tau181. Plasma p-tau217 detected AD pathology with areas under the receiver operating characteristic curves of 0.93–0.96. In secondary care, the accuracies were 89–91%, the positive predictive values 89–95% and the negative predictive values 77–90%. In primary care, the accuracy was 85%, the positive predictive values 82% and the negative predictive values 88%. Accuracy was lower in participants aged ≥80 years (83%), but was unaffected by chronic kidney disease, diabetes, sex, APOE genotype or cognitive stage. Using a two-cutoff approach, accuracies increased to 92–94% in secondary and primary care, excluding 12–17% with intermediate results. Using the plasma p-tau217:Aβ42 ratio did not improve accuracy but reduced intermediate test results (≤10%). Compared with a high-performing mass-spectrometry-based assay for percentage p-tau217, accuracies were comparable in secondary care. However, percentage p-tau217 had higher accuracy in primary care and was unaffected by age. In conclusion, this fully automated p-tau217 test demonstrates high accuracy for identifying AD pathology. A two-cutoff approach might be necessary to optimize performance across diverse settings and subpopulations.