Alzheimer’s Diagnosis in 10 Minutes
Article by Linda Bruton
A new 10 minute test to help in diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease is the CANTAB Paired Associates Learning Test or PAL. This test is opening new doors of possibilities for the treatment of Alzheimer’s by pinpointing with 98% accuracy whether a person has Alzheimer’s disease.
An early concrete diagnosis of this dreaded disease may open the door for new drugs that can be tested on live subjects. The test is said to be able to make a distinction between those patients who are suffering from Alzheimer’s and those individuals who have no neuropsychiatric disorder.
The accuracy of this test is said to be higher than any of the other Alzheimer’s test like the FAST, or MME results. The CANTAB PAL test is reported at a 98% accuracy rate compared to the other test whose accuracy is 90%. Professor Robbins and Dr. Barbara Sahakian are the developers of the test.
“This test is more specific to Alzheimer’s patients”, states Dr. Sahakia, “The CANTAB PAL can test those areas of the brain that are first affected by Alzheimer’s disease”.
Since there is no cure for Alzheimer’s disease, the only alternative is for the patient to receive an early diagnosis in hopes that the disease can be treated.
It is estimated that 2-5% of people over 65 years of age and up to 20% of those over 85 years of age suffer from Alzheimer’s disease.
Early detection and diagnosis are critical factors for the effective treatment of Alzheimer’s Disease. This new test may someday provide the link from early detection to total cure. If there is a 98% accuracy rate, then pharmacological evaluations of victims of the disease will be more reliable.
Early detection of Alzheimer’s can also speed up the research on preventive therapies. Whether those therapies are drug therapies, diet, or other techniques, Scientist will now have living subjects who can undergo stringent test to determine the true effects of these therapies.
The results of the study suggests that impaired performance on one neuropsychological test, CANTAB Paired Associates Learning (PAL), might serve as a marker for pre-clinical Alzheimer’s disease. PAL is a stringent test for episodic memory.
This PAL test assesses visual memory and the ability of the patient to learn new things. This test will prove a useful tool for assessing and making determinations on whether a patient with questionable dementia is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, age-related memory loss or another types of dementia.
Overview of the PAL Test
1. The test is administered on computer screens. 2. There are boxes that are displayed on the screen. 3. These boxes are opened in a random order. 4. One or more of the boxes will display a pattern. 5. The patterns are then displayed in the middle of the screen, one at a time 6. The patient is asked to touch the box where the pattern was originally located.
If the subject makes an error, the patterns are presented again to remind the subject of the locations. The difficulty level increases throughout the test. In the clinical mode, the number of patterns increases from one to eight. At the eighth level, test providers admit that it is a challenge even for those individuals who show no signs of dementia to achieve a perfect score.
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