Research discovered a unique and promising avenue for diagnosing Alzheimer's disease (AD) earlier -- by analyzing AD biomarkers in blood -- so that the impacts of dementia can be reduced. 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.