How Early Can the Latent Dementia Be Identified?

It's becoming clearer and clearer that the earlier you can identify someone who will develop dementia, the more relief you can provide.  The evidence suggests that the earlier you begin treatment with aducanumab, the more success you're likely to have in slowing the advance of symptoms.  So it's increasingly important to find ways of the identifying appearance of Alzheimer's and other dementias.  Recall that the disease process may actually begin 20 years before dementia and well before the first cognitive symptoms are recognized.  So there ought to be ways of seeing if something ominous is going on in someone's head well before even the onset of mild cognitive impairment.

So there's a lot of interest in early diagnosis, and we anticipate acceptance of some very sensitive blood tests in the coming months.  And then there was a recent article in the journal Alzheimer's and Dementia regarding another way in which the probability an individual will develop dementia can be assessed eight years before the a conventional diagnosis.

The article was entitled "Stratifying risk for dementia onset using large-scale electronic health record data: a retrospective cohort study."  Essentially the researchers reviewed the discharge notes for about 270,000 hospital patients and correlated statements in the notes with the incidence of subsequent development of dementia.  They concluded that they could identify an increased probability of a discharged patient developing dementia as much as eight years before an actual diagnosis.