Retinal vascular biomarkers for Alzheimer’s detection [pdf]

Interesting: "After FDR adjustment, significant differences in 13 of 19 RVPs were found between the AD and HC groups (Table 2 and Figure 2). Logistical models combining parameters were created for combined AD classification. A logistic model combining these 13 RVP’s provided good classification performance (81.2% sensitivity, 75.7% specificity and 87.7% AUC), compared with the logistic model including only age and APOE E4 carrier status (68.0% sensitivity, 61.8% specificity and 63.7% AUC)."

Despite the impressive improvement in sensitivity and AUC, this is a small and presumably preliminary study. Additionally, the training and testing sets appear to be the same.

Despite being on nature.com, the journal this is in ("Translational Psychiatry") is not a prestigious one; in fact, it's an online-only journal and you have to pay to get your article published in it. It is suspicious that they couldn't find a better journal to publish such an amazing result in, so the science is probably bad. The statistical significance of p=0.01 is unimpressive.

Honestly, as non-scientists we should just ignore new papers like these. If it's really important, first it'll be published in an excellent journal, then it'll be replicated successfully, then there'll be meta-analyses that confirm how reliable the technique is, and it'll get cited and built upon a bunch of times, and then it'll actually be something that we should consider as anything other than "probably wrong". Which is what it is right now.