Word: mci
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...even this much information to guide them. Instead, they pulled together a group of 404 men and women between the ages of 45 and 103 and gave them a battery of psychological and memory tests. Nearly 230 study subjects had various levels of what we would now recognize as MCI. The rest had normal scores for their age and served as the control group...
Over the course of the study, 42 people died and donated their brains for autopsy--the only foolproof method of diagnosing Alzheimer's disease. To the researchers' surprise, 21 of the 25 people who had originally shown signs of MCI proved to have Alzheimer's disease at autopsy--many more patients than they had anticipated...
Still, the Washington University study does not prove that all MCI is an early stage of Alzheimer's disease. Participants were not chosen at random but had volunteered to be part of the trial. Because a family member or someone close to them had already noticed a change in their mental acuity, the results of the trial may have been skewed. In addition, it's not easy to know where normal forgetfulness ends and clinically significant impairment begins. The Food and Drug Administration invited a panel of experts to Washington last week to try to tackle the problem. The National...
...meantime, at least five therapies are now being studied around the world for their potential in treating MCI. Among the candidate treatments are vitamin E, anti-inflammatory medications called cox-2 inhibitors and the Alzheimer's drug Aricept. The first results aren't expected for three to four years...
Until then, doctors are likely to proceed fairly cautiously. They want to make sure they're helping their MCI patients without unnecessarily stigmatizing them with the Alzheimer's label. Still, there's hope, says Dr. Ronald Petersen, director of the Alzheimer's Researcher Center at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. "These people are really quite functional." For if MCI is indeed the earliest stage of Alzheimer's disease, and if it's possible to slow its progression, patients might be able to delay the onset of full-blown Alzheimer's and preserve a fairly decent quality of life...