Three-Minute Take-Home Test May Identify Symptoms Linked to Alzheimer's Disease

Meanwhile: the big challenge for screening tests is base rate confounding: the test needs to be drastically more specific the lower the percentage of the cohort that truly has the condition is. Relatively low rates of false positives can pile up quickly against true positives for conditions that are rare in the population.

The bad thing here is: you get a test suggestive of early-onset Alzheimers. It could realistically be the case that the test positive indicates in reality a coin-flip chance you have it. But that doesn't matter, because it will take years for the diagnosis to settle, and your mental health is materially injured in the meantime.

One correction here: the amyloid antibodies that successfully clear out a large amount of plaque have yet to report data from intervention trials prior to symptom onset, so we can’t say this with confidence and in fact we have good reason to suspect they would be more effective at this disease stage.

I wrote about this and related topics here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-defense-of-the-amyloid-h...

Edited to add: the sort of test discussed in the OP wouldn’t be relevant to presymptomatic treatment, however, since it’s a test of symptoms rather than biomarkers for preclinical disease.

Have you seen the research in phase-targeted auditory stimulation, memory, amyloid, and sleep? Do you have thoughts on that?

Acoustic stimulation during sleep predicts long-lasting increases in memory performance and beneficial amyloid response in older adults - https://doi.org/10.1093/ageing/afad228

Acoustic Stimulation to Improve Slow-Wave Sleep in Alzheimer's Disease: A Multiple Night At-Home Intervention https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jagp.2024.07.002

I hadn’t seen that research, thanks for passing it along. It seems like an interesting approach to improve slow wave sleep, which is known to help with amyloid clearance.