RESEARCH INTO ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE: SIMILARITY WITH OTHER CONDITIONS
Another reason for studying in detail the way in which the disease affects people is that it may be possible to develop better ways, both of differentiating Alzheimer’s disease from other illnesses, particularly MID, and also of recognizing when MID and Alzheimer’s disease co-exist. Although it is possible to differentiate these conditions with quite a high degree of accuracy, a confident diagnosis is still much more difficult than with many other problems.
Although Alzheimer’s disease is usually regarded as a single condition for the purposes of diagnosis, there is sufficient similarity of symptoms and signs with other conditions to confuse even the most experienced doctor on occasions. In the present state of knowledge, accuracy in making this diagnosis is of the order of 80 per cent. This may well surprise many readers as it means the diagnosis may be wrong for as many as one person in five. This is of particular importance for the trial of new treatments; if it is known that there is a one in five chance of incorrectly including people without Alzheimer’s disease in the study, it means that the treatment must be expected not to work in at least one fifth of cases. This has to be taken into consideration when assessing the results of clinical trials of new medicines.
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