Slashdot Mirror
Promising Blood Test for Alzheimer's
The online edition of the British journal Nature Medicine has a study of a blood test for Alzheimer's disease, developed at Stanford. The test lights up if 18 specific molecules are present in a blood sample. Using samples of stored blood, the test proved 90% accurate in identifying people who had been diagnosed with the disease by other methods. It was also 87% accurate in distinguishing samples from people who do not have Alzheimer's but exhibit some other form of dementia. The numbers of samples involved were small — SFGate's writeup has some details. The Mercury News's article says the test's developers want to begin selling it to laboratories in 2008, for which FDA approval would not be required. They hope to get FDA approval for general use by 2009.
As with all "untreatable" diseases it should be left up to the individual. I can only speak for myself but if I started to have some symptoms I think I would like to know so I could help those close to me when they start to suffer from my disease. As a suffer from Alzheimers I'd wish them to make it as well for me as they can but without putting an extremly heavy burden on them. My "self" would be going and I'd wish them to remember me as my full self, if "I" am not there then they should do as well as they can but I wouldn't want them sacrifice their life for what's left of mine.
I would (not very educatedly) guess that the benefit of such a test is not in verifying that a patient has Alzheimer's but rather they don't. By ruling out Alzheimer's, doctors can focus on other, possibly curable, mental diseases. It would be terrible if someone degenerates into a condition common to a person suffering Alzheimer's, when really they have something different altogether that can be treated (medicine, surgery, etc). But what do I know, I'm no brain-surgeon!
Yours is a intelligent, compassionate and humane response. Mine was selfish and shortsighted. I'm still not sure I'd be able to rise to the standards you set if I ever actually suspected I was in the early stages of dimensia.