It remains challenging in differential diagnosis between Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and vascular cognitive impairment (VCI) in some clinical cases; therefore, we aim to evaluate the diagnostic performance of six plasma biomarkers for AD and VCI in real-world memory clinic in Northwestern China.

Our study validated that plasma p-tau217, GFAP,  and p-tau181 were effective in AD diagnosis especially when they were combined, while the biomarkers showed limited value for differential diagnosis of AD from VCI. The diagnostic performance of plasma biomarkers still needs to be further explored in larger sample size.