Alzheimer's
disease, the most common cause of
dementia in older individuals, is a debilitating neurodegenerative
disease for which there is currently no cure. In the past, AD could only be definitively diagnosed by brain
biopsy or upon autopsy after a patient died. These methods, which demonstrate the presence of the characteristic plaque and tangle lesions in the brain, are still considered the
gold standard for the
pathological diagnoses of AD. However, in the clinical setting brain
biopsy is rarely performed and diagnosis depends on a battery of neurological, psychometric and biochemical tests, including the measurement of
biochemical markers such as the ApoE and tau proteins or the beta-
amyloid peptide in
cerebrospinal fluid and blood. The present invention discloses and describes panels of makers that are differentially expressed in the
disease state relative to their expression in the
normal state and, in particular, identifies and describes panels of makers associated with
neurocognitive disorders. Such
biomarker panel might have considerable value in triaging patients with early memory disorders to yet more specific but more invasive and costly approaches such as molecular markers in CSF and on
PET imaging in clinical trials and possibly in clinical practice.