2 reports in the journal, Archives of Neurology, claim to have come up with accurate blood
tests to detect which patients with mild cognitive impairment will go on to
develop full-blown dementia.
The good news is that an accurate test that doesn’t result
in too many false positive or false negatives would help very much in trials of
drugs to treat dementia symptoms or prevent the progression of cognitive
impairment, although the sad fact is that we have no such drugs currently and
there are only a few in various stages of being studied.
In other words, we won’t have any better treatments for
dementia for a long time so these blood tests will only be useful as a way of
detecting dementia, and that’s not necessarily always a good thing.
In fact, in many situations, it might be a potentially
negative thing (and very negative, at that).
That’s primarily because 1) we still can’t do much to
alter the course of dementia, so presumably a few people who receive a positive
test will become depressed, some perhaps depressed enough to commit suicide,
and 2) there’s that factor of false positives that I mentioned earlier, which
will obviously devastate the lives of the (few?) people who get that kind of
result.
