Alzheimer’s disease can be detected much earlier using new rules

New Guidelines for Alzheimer's Disease

Alzheimer's disease has been the bane of too many families who are often left helpless when a family member is diagnosed with the condition when the signs and symptoms are already too advanced.

But with a better understanding today of Alzheimer's disease, health experts have revised 30-year-old guidelines that consider early, subtle changes in mental function as possible indicators of the insidious disease.

A U.S. National Institute of Aging panel wrote the new guidelines consisting of three phases namely early brain changes, mild cognitive impairment and full-blown Alzheimer's disease.

The new guidelines for clinicians, the first to be made since 1984, is published in Alzheimer's and Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer's Association.

Yet, it does not offer sweeping changes to how most physicians check and treat patients. Rather, the guidelines say that promising diagnostic procedures such as new brain scans and blood/spinal fluid exams should be used for continued research.

Creighton Phelps, director of the Alzheimer's disease program at the National Institute of Aging, says that these experimental tests will not be automatically part of regular patient care anytime soon.

An estimated 26 million people worldwide, including 5.4 million Americans, suffer from Alzheimer's disease. The panel says that those who have been tested early before onset of symptoms had more plaques and protein tangles in their brains. They often have subtle and mild memory loss and other cognitive deterioration.

One problem regarding these new tests is that there is no standard consensus on what specific biomarker should be tested or what are the cutoffs for these substances to be judged as leading to Alzheimer's disease.

Researchers want to use these new brain scans to test the effectiveness of newer drugs to delay the progression of the disease at its onset because current medications are only mostly given when patients exhibit full-blown Alzheimer's disease.

Posted by George Daniels on Thursday April 21 2011, 5:17 AM EST. Ref: AP. All trademarks acknowledged. Filed under Featured News, Health. Comments and Trackbacks closed. Follow responses: RSS 2.0