Researchers in Japan say they have developed a simple technique to detect Alzheimer's disease before symptoms appear.
The National Center for Geriatrics and Gerontology, or NCGG, and precision machinery firm Shimadzu Corporation carried out the joint project.
Alzheimer's is a cause of dementia. A substance called beta-amyloid is known to start accumulating in patients' brains more than 20 years before symptoms develop. But it requires expensive testing to diagnose the disease at an early stage.