Health: Predicting Alzheimer's Disease

Researchers report that a spinal fluid test can be 100 percent accurate in identifying patients with significant memory loss who are on their way to developing Alzheimer's disease.

Although the latest PET scans for Alzheimer's are not commercially available, the spinal fluid tests are.

So the new results also give rise to a difficult question: Should doctors offer, or patients accept, commercially available spinal tap tests to find a disease that is yet untreatable?

And when — researchers optimistically are saying “when” these days — drugs are shown to slow or prevent the disease, the thought is that people will start having brain scans or spinal taps for Alzheimer's as routinely as they might have colonoscopies or mammograms today.

For more, see Spinal-Fluid Test Is Found to Predict Alzheimer's by Gina Kolata, August 9, 2010, at The New York Times.