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New Guidelines open the door to finding
Alzheimer’s Disease-Like Changes in people
without symptoms
Newswise, September 23, 2011 — New
guidelines call for pathologists to look for
possible signs of Alzheimer’s disease in the
brains of deceased patients, regardless of
whether those patients had had symptoms of
dementia in their lives. This means that
when a parent or loved one dies, family
members may find out for the first time that
a relative had telltale signs of Alzheimer’s
disease.
The recommendations, described this week in
Alzforum (www.alzforum.org
), mark a change in how
experts view and study Alzheimer’s.
Alzheimer's disease is an irreversible,
progressive brain disease that slowly
destroys memory and thinking skills. The
disease also causes particular changes in
the brain, such as the deposition of amyloid
protein in clumps or plaques, that
pathologists can detect at autopsy.
Until now, a doctor would first determine if
a patient has signs of dementia and after
the patient’s death it was then the
pathologist’s job to figure out whether the
dementia was due to Alzheimer’s. The new
recommendations however say that a
pathologist should look for plaques and
other hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease in
autopsied brains of people who never showed
signs of dementia in life.
These recommendations developed by the
National institute on Aging and the
Alzheimer’s Association replace guidelines
that were put in place in 1997.
They reflect a growing realization among
researchers that the disease process for
Alzheimer’s disease may actually start more
than a decade before symptoms of dementia
become evident. The new recommendations have
not yet been finalized but are expected to
be approved this month and published by the
new year.
In the meantime, Alzforum reports in a
two-part article series that draft
guidelines have stirred up a fair bit of
debate among experts, especially when it
comes to deciding which brain changes are
important to the disease process, how they
should be measured, and how pathologists in
different centers and countries can
harmonize their work.
