Alzheimer's disease cerebrospinal fluid biomarker discovery: a proteomics approach.

There is significant interest in the identification of effective biomarkers for Alzheimer's disease. Such biomarkers could aid in the clinical diagnosis of the disease and may be useful in assessing the efficacy of various treatment strategies. The search for biomarkers often includes the analysis of changes in cerebrospinal fluid protein expression that correlate with disease. These changes can be measured using a variety of technologies for protein expression profiling. Although there is great promise in the application of these methods to biomarker discovery based on some preliminary observations, there are significant issues in the capabilities of most of these technologies that have limited their effective application. The most recent literature involving proteomic discovery of new cerebrospinal fluid biomarkers for Alzheimer's disease is reviewed.