Microfluidics in neural extracellular vesicles characterization for early Alzheimer's disease diagnosis

Dementia is a general term for conditions impairing cognitive abilities including perception, reasoning, attention, judgment, memory, and daily brain function. Early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD), the most common form of dementia, using neural extracellular vesicles (nEVs) is the focus of the current study. These nEVs carry AD biomarkers including β-amyloid proteins and phosphorylated tau proteins. The novelty of this review lies in developing a microfluidic perspective by introducing the techniques using a microfluidic platform for early diagnosis of AD. A microfluidic device can detect small sample sizes with significantly low concentrations. These devices combine nEV isolation, enrichment, and detection, which makes them ideal candidates for early AD diagnosis.