天博体育

A that might help identify people with Alzheimer鈥檚,聽 published in the August issue of the Archives of Neurology, has generated quite a bit of discussion in the blogosphere.聽 I thought readers might want to follow the discussion, so I鈥檝e shared some links to representative posts. (We will be covering the topic of Alzheimer鈥檚 biomarkers in our November 2010 issue of the Harvard Mental Health Letter.)

It all started when investigators from the Alzheimer鈥檚 Disease Neuroimaging Initiative, a collaborative effort of 57 centers in the United States and Canada, reported that they had identified a that can not only identify people with Alzheimer鈥檚 disease, but also those with mild cognitive impairment (often but not always a precursor to dementia) who are at risk for developing Alzheimer鈥檚 in the future.

An overly enthusiastic report in the generated a series of criticisms that still-preliminary research was being over-sold as a way to diagnose Alzheimer鈥檚 in healthy people. Among those weighing in were Gary Schwitzer and other reviewers at , a project of the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making, who criticized news coverage in the NYT and elsewhere.

More recently, , editor-at-large at MedPage Today, weighed in. As he put it, 鈥淧UHLEASE do not unleash such diagnostic tests for clinical use on the public until we have a way to intervene to positively change prognosis or course of the disease.鈥�

In Dr. A. Zara Herskovits, a clinical fellow in pathology at Brigham and Women鈥檚 Hospital, and Dr. John Growdon, director of the Memory and Movement Disorders Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital, praised the research but also offer detailed cautions about its clinical applicability at this time.聽 That鈥檚 likely the angle we鈥檒l take in our story.