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Using biomarkers for psychiatric diseases can help clinicians achieve early diagnosis and intervention. Currently, the diagnosis of Alzheimer disease (AD) relies on clinical examination, neuropsychological testing, brain imaging, and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) measures of beta-amyloid and tau proteins, the latter recently included in diagnostic guidelines. Glutamate receptors of the N-methyl-D-aspartate subtype (NMDRs) have been linked to synaptic dysfunction in AD. D-serine, the main coagonist of these receptors in frontal cortex, has been linked to NMDR-associated neurotoxicity. These investigators performed several experiments to determine whether D-serine is a clinically useful biomarker of AD.
In a postmortem study, D-serine levels were …