Diagnostic performance of Elecsys immunoassays for cerebrospinal fluid Alzheimer's disease biomarkers in a nonacademic, multicenter memory clinic cohort: The ABIDE project

INTRODUCTION: We compared the automated Elecsys and manual Innotest immunoassays for cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) Alzheimer's disease biomarkers in a multicenter diagnostic setting. METHODS: We collected CSF samples from 137 participants in eight local memory clinics. Amyloid β(1-42) (Aβ42), total tau (t-tau), and phosphorylated tau (p-tau) were centrally analyzed with Innotest and Elecsys assays. Concordances between methods were assessed. RESULTS: Biomarker results strongly correlated between assays with Spearman's ρ 0.94 for Aβ42, 0.98 for t-tau, and 0.98 for p-tau. Using Gaussian mixture modeling, cohort-specific cut-points were estimated at 1092 pg/mL for Aβ42, 235 pg/mL for t-tau, and 24 pg/mL for p-tau. We found an excellent concordance of biomarker abnormality between assays of 97% for Aβ42 and 96% for both t-tau and p-tau. DISCUSSION: The high concordances between Elecsys and Innotest in this nonacademic, multicenter cohort support the use of Elecsys for CSF Alzheimer's disease diagnostics and allow conversion of results between methods.