Published August 5, 2010

PET scan of an Alzheimer's patient's brain (Susan NYC/Flickr)

Every one of us knows someone — or knows someone who knows someone — with Alzheimer’s. The disease can lie in wait for a decade before devastating the brain.

On Radio Boston recently, we brought on a leading Alzheimer’s researcher from Boston, Dr. Brad Hyman, to talk about new ways of diagnosing earlier — followed by a fascinating live chat with Hyman here on Hubbub. The question is, Would you want to take the test? And are we investing too much into diagnosis, not enough into the cure? The medical community is divided.

The New York Times today brings these questions into focus:

Why suggest ways of diagnosing the disease before a person even has symptoms? Why tell people they are doomed?

And are those early diagnosis guidelines just a sop to pharmaceutical companies so they can start marketing expensive, and perhaps not very effective, new drugs?

So the Alzheimer’s Association, with participation from the National Institute on Aging, held a conference call on Wednesday to clarify their position.

They wanted, in particular, to explain why they advocated using so-called biomarkers, like scans for amyloid plaque in the brain, a unique feature of Alzheimer’s, and tests of cerebrospinal fluid. Such brain scans are still experimental.

The groups said biomarkers would be used, at this stage, only for research, with some patients in studies having tests to see how well such brain changes predict disease.

In my brief television career at KPBS San Diego, I reported an Alzheimer’s explainer to get at the science of this disease, which took my great grandfather’s life. I will surely regret bringing this back from the archives, but here it is.

I can’t bear to watch the video with the sound on, but I recall that it’s very informative.