California ? A San Francisco company’s blood test shows promise in diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease – as well as predicting who will succumb to the brain-disabling ailment – according to researchers at Stanford University and several other institutions.

For a study published Sunday in the journal Nature Medicine, the test developed by Satoris was used to examine more than 200 samples of blood taken from people already diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and others unaffected by the disease. To assess the test’s ability to predict the disease, the U.S. and European scientists also checked blood drawn from people with mild cognitive impairments two to six years before the patients developed Alzheimer’s.

The test – which spots Alzheimer’s by detecting unusual activity in 18 proteins associated with the disease – was determined to be 90 percent correct in diagnosing the malady and 91 percent accurate in predicting who will be afflicted by it, according to the study.