Can chemistry in the blood reveal Alzheimer’s disease while it’s still reversible?

Posted on December 1st, 2025

In our lab, we’ve identified a set of serum metabolites that reliably distinguish patients with Alzheimer’s disease from healthy controls.

These compounds reflect oxidative stress and lipid pathway disturbances, biochemical processes known to become abnormal decades before amyloid and tau accumulation.

That means even though these markers were found in patients who already have Alzheimer’s, they likely map to upstream, early-stage pathology, possibly a window where the disease remains biochemically reversible.

We’re now refining this eight-metabolite signature to test whether it can enable earlier, minimally invasive detection and complement existing protein biomarkers such as amyloid and tau.

This work is part of our ongoing effort to understand the metabolic foundations of Alzheimer’s disease and move closer to preventive, biology-based diagnostics.

Question for colleagues:

If we can measure these metabolic imbalances years before symptoms appear, could Alzheimer’s become a preventable disease?

Figure legend. Chemical structures of the eight serum metabolites identified in our Alzheimer’s disease metabolomics study.

These compounds — hexylbenzene, androstenedione, 2,6-di-tert-butylbenzoquinone, 3-methyl-2-cyclohexen-1-one, 1-methylimidazole, m-cresol, ionene, and benzene — form an optimized diagnostic panel that reflects abnormalities in oxidative stress and lipid metabolism, processes believed to occur decades before clinical onset of Alzheimer’s disease.