Millions of families around the world are impacted daily by Alzheimer’s disease. The diagnosis is often devastating. Can Alzheimer’s be predicted? If so, is that one step closer to finding a cure? Swedish scientists say they have developed physical and cognitive tests that are 90% predictive of Alzheimer’s disease occurring several years in the future.
They tested for certain proteins in a person’s cerebral spinal fluid (plasma phosphorylated tau or ”p-tau”) and tested whether the person had an APOE genotype, and then combined those results with scores from a 10-minute executive function and memory test. Applying those results to people who had some degree of memory complaints at the time of testing resulted in predicting Alzheimer’s within two to six years.
One of the scientists, Oskar Hansson, MD, Ph.D. at Lund University in Sweden, stated that “we show for the first time that a time- and cost-effective diagnostic algorithm clearly outperforms the clinical work-up typically done today to predicting Alzheimer’s dementia.”
The test they developed came from a study of 340 people with mild cognitive symptoms who were 60-80 years old, but did not fulfill criteria for any dementia. The goal was to predict progression to Alzheimer’s dementia, versus any other dementia, within four years.
One of the purposes of early prediction of the disease is to determine who should be included in therapeutic trials specifically targeted to stop or slow down Alzheimer’s pathology. The algorithm can be used in clinics without access to advanced diagnostic instruments. One of the scientists noted that “in the future, the algorithm might therefore make a major difference in the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s within primary healthcare.”
The growing ability to predict future diseases and conditions raises thorny social and legal issues. Does everyone want to know whether, in the next several years, they will develop Alzheimer’s? What do close relatives do with that knowledge in terms of planning for future care? What if employers have knowledge of future health or medical issues: should that be part of the hiring or promoting decision?
