Alzheimer's Disease Health Center

Senior Moment or Something Worse? Yes/No Test May Tell

Questionaire Needs Further Testing, Says Doctor continued...

The stakes are high. “The earlier you diagnose Alzheimer’s or MCI, the earlier you treat and the better patients will do,” he says. Lifestyle changes including exercising regularly can help protect memory among people with MCI and possibly prevent it from progressing to full-blown Alzheimer’s disease.

With a better idea of risk, “we can be more aggressive in terms of anything that is evidence-proven and safe for prevention,” Isaacson tells WebMD.

"Everyone would like a simple, useful [mental] screen that could be used by primary care physicians,” says Sam Gandy, MD, PhD, in an email. He is the Mount Sinai chair in Alzheimer's disease research at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City.

The new tool “appears to fulfill the essential criterion of convenience.  What must now be done is lots of field testing by various independent groups to see whether [it] might give misleading results," he says.