Why doctors can’t agree on how to dagnose Alzheimer’s

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Imagine you’re in your late 60s and are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. You start planning the rest of your life: telling your spouse you may eventually become incapacitated; looking into long-term memory care; checking off as many bucket list items as you can.

Six months later, another neurologist finds the opposite: You don’t have Alzheimer’s and aren’t at risk of developing it. Divergent diagnoses for Alzheimer’s are the result of different criteria for diagnosing the disease. Some doctors worry the differing approaches can result in patients going misdiagnosed, or worse, being prescribed medications with potential negative health effects.

The problem highlights a larger question: How should Alzheimer’s disease be defined? Is it a biological disease based solely on the presence of brain proteins? Or is it a more complicated diagnosis that involves weighing risk and other factors? The Alzheimer’s Association 2024 criteria for diagnosis requires evidence of the brain protein amyloid. At the International Working Group, a global consortium of neurologists and researchers, its criteria requires three things: the presence of amyloid; tau, another biomarker of Alzheimer’s disease; and cognitive symptoms. Dr.

Gayatri Devi, director of Park Avenue Neurology in New York City, is a neurologist who says over the past year she has seen an increasing number of patients who were told they had Alzheimer’s disease when they didn’t. One patient, a human-resources executive, had erroneously been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s based on a faulty PET scan of his brain that had read positive for amyloid and his own fears of memory issues because he had missed an important meeting. He was then started on