A new blood test for Alzheimer's can detect the onset of the disease up to 10 years before symptoms appear and has 100 per cent accuracy rate.
The test could pick up on the very early stages of Alzheimer's disease with 100 per cent accuracy when tested on 174 individuals.
The blood test could be used to spot which patients are most at risk so that treatment can begin earlier or lifestyles altered, Telegraph reported.
"We will need replication and validation, but I'm very optimistic this work will hold," said Dimitrios Kapogiannis, the study's lead author and a neuroscientist at the National Institute on Ageing.
Researchers gathered blood samples from 70 individuals with Alzheimer's disease, 20 cognitively normal elderly with diabetes, and 84 healthy adults.
Of the participants, 22 of the Alzheimer's patients provided samples taken one to 10 years before diagnosis.
Researchers found that those participants who went on to get Alzheimer's had far higher levels of the inactive form of IRS-1.
These levels were so consistent that the team could accurately predict whether a blood sample came from an Alzheimer's patient, healthy individual, or a diabetic.
