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Technology To Detect Alzheimer's Takes SXSW Prize
An anonymous reader writes "Being able to diagnose people with Alzheimer's disease years before debilitating symptoms appear is now a step closer to reality. Researchers behind Neurotrack, the technology startup that took the first place health prize at this year's South by Southwest (SXSW) startup accelerator in Austin. The company says their new technology can diagnose Alzheimer's disease up to six years before symptoms appear with 100% accuracy."
A good screening test is one that identifies a treatable disease.
Or six years extra for people to try experimental treatments before symptoms kick in. Or six extra years to decide when or how to gracefully leave this world, with dignity.
This device can detect Alzheimer's, and it sure as hell can detect Alzheimer's!
Not quite in line with the data. FTFA "Kaplan said 100 percent of subjects who scored below 50 percent on the test have gone to receive an Alzheimer's diagnosis within six years, while none of those who scored above 67 have developed Alzheimer's." This doesn't equate to 100% accuracy. What happens between 50 and 67%? Plus it doesn't say what the sample size is. Is it 1, 10, 100, 1000? Some more robust statistics would have been nice. They were probably trying to keep it simple instead of confusing people with 99/99, but they could have said "approaching 100%".
GENERATION 27: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Now they can figure out who has it, before it is too late. I heard it described as "this test is like before mammograms, when a woman found out she has breast cancer It was always stage 4 at that point". Now, with a test, researchers have a better window to fight it.
Looking for treatment and prevention requires a good way to measure if a therapy is working. Using clinical progression to Alzheimer's disease (AD) requires a huge multi-year study to get any real statistical power. Not everyone goes on to develop AD, people die from other stuff, etc. If a treatment doesn't work, you've just wasted lots of $ and time to find that out (e.g., http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18305231). Maybe you had your dose wrong, maybe you had the timing off, ... The search space for a treatment is HUGE, there has a to be an efficient way to quickly (relative here) and accurately determine if a therapy works. Having a way to detect and monitor neurodegenerative diseases would be awesome from a research standpoint. It would allow therapy to be tested using a cross sectional study rather than a longitudinal study.
Claim of 100% accuracy.
A Twitter full of "launch" and "pitch" announcements and not much else.
A website that is nothing more than a placeholder.
Yeah, they're going straight into the history books, they are.
You want me to believe you, publish, and let people rip it apart. If the public-facing part of your whole organisation is talking of nothing more than startup awards and pitches, I don't see how you can be doing proper research, or how you can be selling it to medical establishments. And without bothering to provide evidence of either, I can only assume it's snake-oil.
A good screening test is one that identifies a treatable disease.
It's six years in which to eliminate aluminum in your drinking water and get rid of those aluminum pans, drinking from aluminum cans, and aluminum water bottles. The Wikipedia article on the disease shows links to 3 studies where there is a high correlation between dietary and/or drinking water aluminum exposure and the onset of Alzheimer's.
Moses' people couldn't make bricks without straw, and your brain can't make amyloid plaques without aluminum.
I dunno.
I think it's more like being told in 6 years you WILL have alzhiemers and there's nothing you can do about it. And, yes, the test is 100% accurate.
Depressing.
THL phish sticks
Drinking from Aluminum cans isn't going to expose you to Aluminum, at least not much. Instead it will expose you to plastics which strongly resemble sex hormones, because the cans are lined with plastic, and all plastic beverage containers leach toxics into their contents.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It is very easy to make a test that detects 100% of patients who will eventually get a disease. Just make it always say "positive" and you're done. The hard thing is balancing the ability to detect a disease and avoid false negatives (sensitivity) with the ability to detect absence of disease and avoid false positives (specificity). Related to this are the positive predictive negative predictive values. Since Alzheimer's is very difficult to diagnose clinically and the only definitive proof is a biopsy/autopsy, I very much doubt a screening test would exist with a 100 % sensitivity and/or specificity.
Moses' people couldn't make bricks without straw, and your brain can't make amyloid plaques without aluminum.
Since Aluminum comprises a full 8% of the earth's crust, good luck with that.
There's growing evidence that treating Alzheimer's early, before substantial amyloid plaques have formed, can quite significantly delay the onset of symptoms. You need early screening tools to implement this.
A specific selective test even in the middle of dementia (symptom) identifying Alzheimer's (disease) is beneficial. There's other causes of dementia, and (until now) Alzheimer's can only be conclusively diagnosed postmortem (currently advanced imaging is used to rule out other causes of dementia by process of elimination, but diagnosis isn't confirmed until the autopsy).
Also, a successful diagnosis early in the process can eliminate much of the fear and confusion about the source of the dementia. Of course you replace that with fear regarding the disease - but at least you don't have the confusion and often family/peer conflict arising from unknown (and perhaps unrealized) early stage dementia.
Finally, I'll address Nut Job (hello AC (starter of this thread) do you mind if I address you as Nut Job, perhaps NJ for short? That'll help differentiate between you and the other ACs in this thread).
Nut Job seems to want a treatment before diagnosis of a disease which progresses asymptomatically for many years. Now I personally would prefer my doctor to not put me through a regimen of medicine, radiation, chemotherapy, organ transplant (and additional organ transplant due to the failure induced by the new standard of preventative care) based on the idea that I may come down with symptoms at some point in the future. I suspect that other people and their physicians (and regulatory bodies) may also feel the same. Now NJ, you may be thinking that I've engaged in some hyperbole and perhaps skated across the line into a common logical fallacy or two, but I'm also willing to bet that my point has been communicated. So I'll end with QED which I believe is a Latin acronym for "neener, neener!"
People with a degenerative disease are losing their mental faculties. It's happening slowly enough that people around them don't notice it immediately, but with time they become more confused and unaware of their surroundings. They become less and less capable of the basic things that get other people through life on a day by day basis. They might not be able to go to the toilet hygenically, they might forget how to cook, they forget where things are - but worse - they forget and become unaware that they even have a condition.
The joke of old people always thinking nurses are stealing their things is a joke about dementia and shouldn't be a joke at all. From their perspective they put something down, or threw it out, and then later couldn't remember doing that and think it must've been stolen. You have people all around you all the time constantly managing you, but you don't remember who they are or why they're there at times.
Research the cure? Really? Even if the person was an expert in neurological disease, in that state they would have no chance of remotely helping. You lose your agency and become a burden on your relatives yet are simultaneously likely to drive them away and their last memories of you are not going to be of the person you once were.
The saddest thing, about Alzheimers and dementia and other conditions of their kind is that by the time you would definitely euthanize yourself, you're incapable of really giving informed consent about it at all. If I could have 6 years of warning that I would have Alzheimer's symptoms later, then the biggest problem would be that I couldn't take a time-delay poison that would kill me after 8 if I forgot to delay it.
I would welcome the advance notice. I'd like to have a chance to get my affairs in order and do a few things before I'm unable.
I've no time for being depressed, that would come much later. Or perhaps not, if I lived everything to the best of my ability. I could perhaps be happy and at peace.
Now they can figure out who has it, before it is too late.
Now insurance companies can figure out who will get it, so they can make sure they don't get stuck with you.
I suppose most Alzheimer's patients would be on Medicare, but the long term care insurance companies would love this.
Who wants to know that they will suffer an uncurable disease well before it strikes?
It is only incurable for now. Progress is being made. People tend to direct their charitable contributions to causes that affect them directly. So if more people know they will get Alzheimer's Disease, or someone they care about will get it, more money will be contributed towards finding a cure, rather than contributed toward, say, political campaigns or religious organizations. This is a good thing.
There's growing evidence that treating Alzheimer's early, before substantial amyloid plaques have formed, can quite significantly delay the onset of symptoms.
Indeed. If you know you have AD, there are preventative measures you can take to delay, and possibly avoid, the onset. There are antibodies that can eliminate the amyloid plaques, but if you wait too long, there is too much and the antibodies cause fatal brain inflammation. Here is an article with more information: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23217740. Wikipedia also has a good overview.
The only way to die with dignity of degenerative disease is to help with research into its cure, even if that means dying because of the treatments you've taken.
Suicide helps nobody but yourself. I suppose it's your right, but it's totally selfish.
Bollocks. You do not have a moral duty to suffer for the sake of other people you don't even know. Before life becomes intolerable, and while I am still capable, if I want to end it, I will.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Though in some cases, nurses actually do steal stuff. It happens.
My mom languished in a nursing home for 10 years, with Alzheimer's and dementia, a very long time actually, before she died. The family made sure no valuables were kept there, so fortunately I can't say I saw it happen from personal anecdote.
It's heartbreaking to watch someone lose their minds, their memories; their very identity. I'd rather be dead than suffer that. This test is a good thing though, as at least Alz won't be able to sneak up on it's victims like it usually does -at first it's hard to tell if it's just forgetfulness due to old age or something more serious. Research seems to be closing in and treatment in the near future looks promising.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
I would welcome the advance notice. I'd like to have a chance to get my affairs in order and do a few things before I'm unable.
Do those things now; you never know when your time is up.
My wife was perfectly healthy until the day before Thanksgiving 2005 when, with only the complaint of a persistent headache, she was diagnosed with a fatal brain tumor known as a Glioblastoma Multiforme (GBM). She died in my arms just seven weeks later; we had been together for 20 years.
While she was 61, I was 42 at that time. We both had Wills and our finances pretty well in order anyway, but now I have a more detailed Will, beneficiaries and/or transfer on death notices on my investments, copies of important paperwork in a firesafe at home, and a Living Will registered at U.S. Living Will Registry that includes a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) - many hospitals can provide and submit the paperwork and having them do so will also cover the $5/year fee. I have also signed up with the Virginia State Anatomical Program to donate my body to science, like my wife asked me to do for her.
We were lucky and I'm grateful for all our years and those last seven weeks together, including our last Thanksgiving, wedding anniversary, Christmas and New Year. (though, the Winter season suck for me now.) Many people aren't so lucky and the end comes very suddenly.
Remember Sue...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .