Early Alzheimer's disease diagnostics: Wait! Wait! Don't tell me!

N News from this year’s International Congress on Alzheier’s Disease (ICAD) meeting, attended by more than ,000 scientists worldwide, offered many clear-minded reaons to hope for longer-term advances in the war against lzheimer’s disease (AD). Meanwhile here at ground zero, wo developments combine to create an emotional and oral gridlock, a Catch-22 for our generation. On the one hand, a new Mayo Clinic study tells us that form of “mental decline” that is often a precursor to full D is two to three times more common than previously hought, mostly in men [1]. Is my youthful “senior moment” a multi-tasking lapse, or s it the slow creep of the same disease that stole my usband and mother away, now come to drag me down as ell? On the other hand, dozens of very promising studies out f ICAD looked to a new era in early diagnostics as the ost immediate conquest against AD. From many different linical perspectives, we heard that early diagnosis biomarers could revolutionize the search for therapies, especially reventive therapies; that the earlier diagnosis is made and herapy is initiated, the better the benefit to patients because here is presumably less brain damage at these early stages. Thus we are face to face with the defining dilemma of ur time: the disease is forecast to be an epidemic of the oomer generation worldwide; treatment breakthroughs, midst the yet unproven hype about a few, are still yet to ppear over the horizon; but we can now know with inreasing certainty whether it has targeted us personally.