A new study from Sweden found blood tests can help in detecting Alzheimer's disease.

We spoke to a Louisville based doctor about it in tonight's look at medical news.

Most people would prefer a blood test over a spinal fluid exam, a spinal tap in this particular study, they looked at a blood test looking at a couple of different proteins, forms of amyloid and forms of phosphorylated tau.

Those are the hallmarks in Alzheimer's disease.

And they found that whether these are patients from a primary care clinic or from a specialty clinic, they improved their accuracy, their ability to detect Alzheimer's disease all the way up to 90%.

So we improved from either 60 or 70% up to 90% with a fairly simple blood test.

And this was shown repeatedly to be reliable.

Once you do some type of medical evaluation where we show that their memory loss, that's usually just in the office and then the blood test is like any other blood tests we might have for your cholesterol or blood sugar or anything else, except that we don't need to be fasting for it.

And it's really that simple.

Now, the test is not done in just any hospital laboratory around the country.

For this particular one, it is sent off to a central lab and some of the others in development.

We don't get the results back usually for a couple of weeks.

It very often takes months, if not years, for people to receive a diagnosis.

And there are a lot of reasons for that.

And part of it is just poor access to specialists like us.

The worst thing in the world is to tell someone, Had I seen you six months or a year earlier, you might have been a candidate for one of these new treatments and now you're not.

Tests like this will help accelerate that process and allow more people to benefit from these therapies.

This blood test, if it with continued development, may be a way to help us really shorten those times, to get people the right diagnosis, to get them to the treatment that may really impact this disease and really help them go forward.

Another hurdle there, Dr. Cooper hopes more insurance companies will be able to cover these tests in the future.