Scientists are getting closer to developing a blood test for Alzheimer's disease according to new research published this week. 

British scientists monitored 220 patients with mild cognitive impairments and identified 10 proteins that were present in the blood of 87 per cent of the study participants who went on to develop Alzheimer's within a year.

A blood test could be developed to detect the proteins in the blood, potentially allowing screening for the brain-wasting disease and earlier treatment with drugs for those testing positive.

"Many of our drug trials fail because by the time patients are given the drugs, the brain has already been too severely affected," said Oxford University neuroscience professor Simon Lovestone, who led the study at King's College London.

"A simple blood test could help us identify patients at a much earlier stage to take part in new trials and hopefully develop treatments which could prevent the progression of the disease.

"The next step will be to validate our findings in further sample sets."

Around 35 million people worldwide suffer from Alzheimer's, 50,000 in New Zealand. The fatal disease had an estimated global social cost in 2010 of US$604 billion. The research was published in the journal Alzheimer's & Dementia.

Alzheimer's New Zealand welcomed the study findings:

"Receiving a diagnosis allows people affected by dementia to access services and support from local Alzheimers organisations and gives them the opportunity to plan for their future. Diagnostic tools such as this would be very helpful in detecting dementia in its early stages, and may add to the ability to do further research into prevention of dementia," a statement read.

"However it is early days for this study and further trials are required with a diverse range of people before its effectiveness can be determined."

Our colleagues at the UK SMC gathered reaction from experts:

Dr James Pickett, Head of Research, Alzheimer's Society, said:

"Finding a way to detect dementia before symptoms develop would revolutionise research into the condition. Most of the blood proteins identified here are not new to the dementia community, but this study has brought them together into a protein set that seems to predict disease severity. Although it needs to be validated in a larger group of people, their modelling work shows a set of 10 proteins can predict which people with mild cognitive impairments will progress to developing dementia.

Read the commentary in full here.

Read Diedrie Mussen's report on the research findings in the Dominion Post

Neonicotinoids, a class of neuro active insecticide previously linked to declining bee populations has, in a new study, also been pinpointed as a cause of bird population decline.

Dutch researchers published their findings in Nature this week, outlining a study showing that bird population trends were significantly more negative in streams and waterways in the Netherlands where concentrations of imidacloprid, the most commonly-used neonicotinoid insecticide, were higher.

Neonicotinoids are used to kill insects that can damage crops - but which also form an important food source for birds. Among the birds most affected, according to the researchers, are farmland birds like starlings, tree sparrows and swallows.

"These insecticides appear to be having more profound effects than just killing our pollinating insects," said ecologist Caspar Hallmann of Radboud University in the Netherlands, an author on the new study.

In a statement issued by neonicotinoid manufacturer Bayer, the company said the new study "provides no substantiated evidence of the alleged indirect effects of imidacloprid on insectivorous birds," and that it "does not demonstrate that there is a causal link."

Before the Headlines

The UK Science Media Centre evaluated the researcher's data and techniques in the latest in its "Before the Headlines" series.

The analysis found:

"Data on bird populations were collected in a standardised way over a long period of time in The Netherlands, so the study had a robust dataset to track bird populations.

"The authors were careful to exclude alternative explanations for the association between neonicotinoids and bird population decline. They found no such relationship between location and population decline in a time period before imidacloprid was used, thus ruling out a long-term trend. They also adjusted for land use in a multivariate analysis.

"A limitation is that the research is from a single country, so we cannot be sure that the results would apply outside The Netherlands. However, it seems reasonable to believe that countries with similar insect and bird populations would behave similarly."

Read the analysis and commentary from scientists here.

Use of the 30-metre dish is a boon for AUT's Professor of Astronomy, Sergei Gulyaev, as it significantly increases the collecting area and spectrum range his radio telescope can access.

The earth station is sited just a few hundred metres away from a 12-metre radio telescope operated by AUT on land also owned by Telecom. 

What is the team looking skyward for? Galactic nuclei, star formation, the Milky Way's centre, cosmic masers and gaseous components of our Galaxy are some of the things they are studying.

With the Southern Cross Cable and other satellite connections available to it, the earth station has been surplus to requirements at Telecom for years. The dish now works in conjunction with Australian radio telescopes to form the long-baseline array.

The Institute is also using the dish as a base for some interesting commercial work. As Delwyn Dickey from the Rodney Times reports:

"The Warkworth facility is also the last one in the Pacific before the Mauna Kea Observatory 7000km away in Hawaii. This has led to IRASR picking up a 10-year contract to track the Space-X vehicle servicing the International Space Station as it heads across the Pacific."