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Questions grow about the validity and usefulness of direct-to-consumer blood tests for Alzheimer’s Disease

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For the first time, peo­ple wor­ried about their risk of Alzheimer’s dis­ease can go online, order a blood test, and receive results in the pri­va­cy of their homes.

This might seem appeal­ing on the sur­face, but the devel­op­ment has Alzheimer’s researchers and clin­i­cians up in arms.

The Quest Diag­nos­tics blood test, AD-Detect, mea­sures ele­vat­ed lev­els of amy­loid-beta pro­teins, a sig­na­ture char­ac­ter­is­tic of Alzheimer’s. Intro­duced in late July, the test is tar­get­ed pri­mar­i­ly at peo­ple 50 and old­er who sus­pect their mem­o­ry and think­ing might be impaired and peo­ple with a fam­i­ly his­to­ry of Alzheimer’s or genet­ic risks for the con­di­tion. [Read more…] about Ques­tions grow about the valid­i­ty and use­ful­ness of direct-to-con­sumer blood tests for Alzheimer’s Disease

Dr. Gary Small’s The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head: Brain Fog

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(Edi­tor’s Note: what fol­lows is an excerpt from Dr. Gary Small and Gigi Vor­gan’s new book, The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head: A Psy­chi­a­trist’s Sto­ries of His Most Bizarre Cas­es)

CHAPTER TEN

Brain Fog

Sum­mer 1990

Gigi and I had moved to Stu­dio City, about a forty-minute com­mute to UCLA. On week­ends, we often went to the movies at Uni­ver­sal City­Walk, a repli­ca­tion of Los Ange­les with­in Los Ange­les. Why peo­ple couldn’t just walk down the real streets of Los Ange­les made no sense to me, yet there we were, on a Fri­day evening, eat­ing ice cream and strolling down a sim­u­lat­ed street.

We had just seen Total Recall, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s new sci­encefic­tion film about a con­struc­tion work­er who under­goes a false mem­o­ry trans­plant that takes him on an imag­i­nary trip to Mars. But things go wrong, and when he comes out of it, he can’t tell what’s real and what’s imagined.

“When he first got back from Mars, there were so many signs that he was from the future that I believed it,” I said.
“But hon­ey, before he had that mem­o­ry implant done, he was per­fect­ly hap­py liv­ing in the present—on Earth. Then he got all paranoid.”
“Of course he did. How do you know what’s real­i­ty if you can’t trust your mem­o­ry?” I asked.
“I don’t know; you’re the mem­o­ry expert. I want to go into this shop for a minute.” Gigi dis­ap­peared into a record store.

As I ate my ice cream and watched the crowds, I kept think­ing about those ques­tions. If two real­i­ties seem equal­ly true, how would you know which ver­sion to believe? Many of my patients strug­gled with sim­i­lar issues, whether they were psy­chot­ic, dement­ed, or sim­ply hav­ing mem­o­ry problems.

Over the past few years, I had begun to con­cen­trate a large part of my prac­tice on mem­o­ry issues—not just in old­er patients with Alzheimer’s dis­ease but in mid­dle-aged peo­ple who were wor­ried about their increas­ing for­get­ful­ness. My research was also focus­ing on ear­ly detec­tion of demen­tia and age-relat­ed mem­o­ry decline, and I was devel­op­ing brain imag­ing as a diag­nos­tic tool.

Gigi came back with a bag of CDs and said [Read more…] about Dr. Gary Small’s The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head: Brain Fog