It can be discomforting when your memory fails. It can cause people to worry that dementia is right around the corner.
A simple blood test will now allow doctors to detect Alzheimer’s disease at an early stage.
Even before symptoms appear, a protein called beta-amyloid can begin to be stored in the brain and form plaques.
Another protein, called the tau protein, changes. The net result is that brain cells are damaged and die, so that cognitive symptoms, such as failing memory, crop up.
These blood tests have been used in Sweden for large research projects. Researchers have shown that they can diagnose the disease many years before symptoms appear.
The fact that there have been major breakthroughs in diagnosis, while the development of drugs that can slow dementia lags far behind poses real ethical dilemmas.
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[Researcher Geir] Selbæk is more skeptical about letting a patient know that he or she risks developing this serious disease in five or ten years without having a treatment to offer.
“It may only be a year until we have a blood test that can identify people who will develop Alzheimer’s. But it will probably be many years before there is a treatment that can help prevent the development of the disease,” he said.
