Multiplex biomarkers in blood

Advances in the field of blood biomarker discovery will help in identifying Alzheimer's disease in its preclinical stage, allowing treatment to be initiated before irreversible damage occurs. This review discusses some recent past and current approaches being taken by researchers in the field. Individual blood biomarkers have been unsuccessful in defining the disease pathology, progression and thus diagnosis. This directs to the need for discovering a multiplex panel of blood biomarkers as a promising approach with high sensitivity and specificity for early diagnosis. However, it is a great challenge to standardize a worldwide blood biomarker panel due to the innate differences in the population tested, nature of the samples and methods utilised in different studies across the globe. We highlight several issues that result in the lack of reproducibility in this field of research currently faced by researchers. Several important measures are summarized towards the end of the review that can be taken to minimize the variability among various centres. © 2013 BioMed Central Ltd.