Suspicious of Alzheimer's Diagnosis I am troubled that your
physician had you tested for Alzheimer's because there is no
valid test that can be done on a living patient. The diagnosis
can only be made with certainty in a postmortem examination.
Perhaps your doctor arranged to test for a genetic variation
called APOE-4, or double 4. This test checks whether a person
has a gene that makes him or her susceptible to developing
Alzheimer's, but testing positive is neither diagnostic nor
predictive. It only indicates some susceptibility. I do not
believe that tests of this sort should be done in practice,
because we do not have effective treatments and the tests
principally promote anxiety. Such a test has a place in
research, to evaluate new medications and other interventions.
Ask your doctor what tests she did and what, specifically, they
revealed. It may also be useful to do other tests to rule out
other possibilities. Certain metabolic disorders — for example,
thyroid disease, depression, and nutritional defic