Alzheimer’s Risk: Do You Want to Know?
By Matt McMillen
If a test could tell whether you’ll get Alzheimer's disease someday, would you want to know? And if so, what would you do with that knowledge?
These questions are becoming more and more important as researchers close in on tools to predict your risk of Alzheimer’s disease decades before symptoms start to appear.
“Primary care physicians, in the disease’s early stages, [eventually] could be able to say, ‘It looks like there’s a problem here’ through a blood test, a saliva test, or by looking at the retina,” says Dean Hartley, PhD, director of science initiatives for the Alzheimer’s Association. “But there’s no medical test now. It’s all in the research stage.”