New research has discovered a unique and promising avenue for diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease (AD) earlier – by analysing AD biomarkers in blood – so that the impacts of dementia can be reduced. In a world first, the researchers applied inorganic analytical geochemistry techniques, originally developed for cosmochemistry – for example, to study the formation and evolution of the Earth, the Moon, other planets and asteroid samples – and adapted these highly sensitive techniques to search for early biomarkers of AD in human blood serum.