Alzheimer's disease biomarkers: Walk with deliberate haste, don't run blithely on?

摘要

The term biomarker originated from petroleum engineering, when Wolfgang Seifert at Chevron used it to describe the origin of hydrocarbons in petroleum. Since then, the term biomarker has evolved and even become popular in medicine and other disciplines. A quick survey of original publications indexed in PubMed containing the term "biomarker" in the title or abstract has increased 45-fold from 1994 to 2012, and the number of publications which contain "Alzheimer's disease (AD)" and "biomarker" also increased from under 10 in 2000 to over 300 in 2013. While this is most probably an underestimate of all biomarker-related work (after all, the search term "biomarker" poorly predicts biomarker studies), the increasing use of this term in the era of title character count and abstract word count can be viewed as scientists' interest in this topic. Compared to our colleagues focused on more accessible organ systems, clinical neuroscientists rarely have the opportunity to analyze sufficient sampling from the brain in the ante-mortem phase to elucidate the sequence of events leading to cognitive decline.