Alzheimers disease (AD) is the most common type of dementia in aging adults with the number of people living with AD projected to increase, making the search for treatments and tools to diagnose and measure disease progression increasingly urgent. In particular, ideal biomarkers for diagnosis of AD should not only have high specificity for disease versus non-disease and high sensitivity for distinguishing between disease types but also should be able to detect changes at a very early stage of the disease. Using microglia activation as an early event of ADs onset, the present inventors have identified a panel of biomarkers in CSF which has the potential to diagnose, stage and determine the likelihood of developing AD.