A test to find who will develop Alzheimer’s dementia in future developed

Checklist includes risk factors ranging from genes to bodyweight to alcoholisim to the speed of buttoning your shirt!

A checklist that can almost correctly predict the possibility of Alzheimer’s disease occurring to a person in future has been developed.

The Alzheimer’s checklist includes risk factors – both conventional and newly identified – in 88 percent of patients according to their risk of developing dementia within six years, Deborah Barnes of the University of California San Francisco and colleagues reported  in Neurology.

Risk factors in the new Alzheimer’s disease prediction checklist includes age, modified mini-mental state (3MS) examination, digit symbol, substitution test (DSST), body mass index,APOE gene,white matter in brain etc.

The risk of Alzheimer’s increases after age 75 and increases even further after age 80.

The 3MS exam and DSST are series of questions and answers that helps determine cognitive function and is one of the diagnostic tests a doctor will use for Alzheimer’s. Lower scores on this tests indicates a higher risk for Alzheimer’s.

Some parameters in the Alzheimer’s disease prediction checklist

• Being underwight
• History of heart bypass surgery
• Slow in buttoning up a shirt

Alzheimers is associated with a specific variant of the APOE gene, e4. Nearly half of all people with the Alzheimer’s have the gene.

The presence of white matter on an MRI is associated with increased Alzheimer’s risks.

15-point scale also includes some lesser-known risk factors, such as being underweight, having a history of heart bypass surgery, not drinking alcohol or being slow to do physical tasks like buttoning a shirt.

A healthy body weight is important in preventing Alzheimer’s disease. Having a body mass index (BMI) below 18.5, is associated with an increased risk for developing the illness.

Heart troubles like enlarged heart ventricles, thicker carotid artery walls and a past coronary bypass surgery can all signal a higher Alzheimer’s risk.

Cholesterol has been linked with Alzheimer’s risk and patients with atherosclerosis, the narrowed blood vessels cannot deliver oxygen and sugar to the brain, creating a cognitive deficit.

Speed of buttoning up a shirt is also a parameter. The longest time for buttoning up a shirt is forty-five seconds. People who take longer being noted as possibly having a higher Alzheimer’s risk.

Moderate drinking of alcohol (1-6 drinks per week) may actually be more beneficial than abstaining completely. People who drank no alcohol saw a slightly higher risk of dementia.

The new checklist could help doctors track on patients.”This new risk index could be very important both for research and for people at risk of developing dementia and their families,” Barnes said in a statement.

People having score of 8 or higher are considered at high risk of developing dementia within the next six years.

Researchers found more than half of patients with a high score — 56 percent of them — developed some form of dementia, compared with 4.2 percent of those with a low score and 22.8 percent of those who fell in between.

The researchers studied 3,375 people with an average age of 76 and no evidence of dementia to develop the index. Over six years, 480 of the people developed dementia.

Through six years of follow-up, 14 percent developed some form of dementia. Of those, 51 percent were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, 13 percent with vascular dementia, 31 percent with mixed dementia, and 5 percent with other types.

The study identified patients who would experience dementia 56 percent of the time, and it was able to correctly rule out a person for dementia 90 percent of the time. The test yielded the correct answer 88 percent of the time over the six years encompassed by the research.

This late-life index is slightly more accurate than the midlife index, which “may suggest that it is easier to predict dementia risk closer to symptom onset,” the researchers said.

But while researchers are not certain about the cause of this form of dementia that typically occurs in old age, they have noticed some associations between certain lifestyle factors and biomarkers and the risk of Alzheimer’s disease.

It is generally very difficult to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease.  Doing a postmortem autopsy of the brain is the only way currently available to diagnose the disease.

It is now estimated that every 70 seconds someone develops the condition, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. The association further estimates that about 5.3 million Americans are living with Alzheimer’s.