Dementia – Brown Pundits

Many of us are likely to suffer from dementia as we drink, breathe and wallow in an ever more poisonous environment (SAsians more than most). It is imperative to be able to predict this condition in advance. Once the tell-tale signs are confirmed, we can go out and have a gala party, sign off on the will (please do that anyway), take a boat out to the sea and…jump in with the fishes.

Only one small question: 90% accuracy sounds very impressive (also likely to improve over time), but is it??

…
A
study, published in the journal Nature Medicine, identified 10
molecules in blood could be used to predict with at least 90% accuracy
whether people will go on to develop mild cognitive impairment or
Alzheimer’s.

“The lipid panel was able to distinguish with
90% accuracy these two distinct groups: cognitively normal participants
who would progress to MCI or AD within two to three years, and those who
would remain normal in the near future,” said one of the study’s
authors, Professor Howard Federoff.

Dr Doug Brown, director of research and development at
the Alzheimer’s Society, added: “Having such a test would be an
interesting development, but it also throws up ethical considerations. “If
this does develop in the future people must be given a choice about
whether they would want to know, and fully understand the implications.

regards

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Razib Khan is a Bangladeshi-American geneticist and writer. He is co-founder of Brown Pundits and runs Unsupervised Learning, a Substack on population genetics, evolution, history, and politics with more than 55,000 subscribers, alongside the accompanying podcast. He has blogged at Gene Expression since the early 2000s. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Review, Slate, India Today, Quillette, and UnHerd. He is Director of Operations at FUTO in Austin, Texas, and co-founder of GenRAIT, a life-sciences platform company. Earlier in his career he developed ancestry algorithms for Gene by Gene, the Genographic Project, and Insitome, and was among the first employees at Embark Veterinary. Born in Dhaka and raised in upstate New York and eastern Oregon, he holds degrees in biochemistry (2000) and biology (2006) from the University of Oregon, and undertook doctoral work in genomics and genetics at UC Davis. He lives in Austin. View all posts by Brown Pundits Archive