A blood-prick test for Alzheimet’s using tau markers. This test is promoted beneficial because it would allow early start to treatment for the disease—and every pharmacological intervention available so far is effective only in early stages of disease progession.
But I can attest that it would be far more significant for early-onset Alzheimer’s. My partner had weird behavioral changes starting in her early 50s. Her medical and mental health health providers assumed she was just crazy (in a nutshell). They went through half the DSM-IV-R and DSM-V with fancy labels about what was wrong, drugs to match, talk-therapy programs where she was blamed for “not trying hard enough.”
And all the time they were barking up the wrong tree, wasting buckets of time and money, and making everyone involved miserable.
A simple blood test. Shaking my head.
It’s so good that the testing is available, but so sad that it was too late to help your partner. We’re all seeing this happen these days, it seems. Medicine is improving so quickly, but, as of yet, not quickly enough to save our family members who are already sick.
Thank you—although the new test looks specifically for the chemical tau (which creates tangles that clog neural networks). I’m digging deeper into early-onset, and wonder if the new test would have done any good, since toxic amyloid-beta plaque deposits may be the bigger culprit there… not sure if tau tangles would have been present in measurable amounts in earlier stages. Just a hypothesis—I’m still digging. There may not be an answer out there (yet).
And as I’ve noted elsewhere, researchers seem unduly narrow in their selection of research participants during development, excluding minorities and women, and most likely atypical early-onset cases as well.