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An Early Test for Alzheimer’s Disease: Prophetic Medicine Takes Another Step
Researchers at Stanford University appear to have developed a blood test that can predict the onset of diagnosable Alzheimer’s Disease with up to 90 percent accuracy. The New York Times reports that the test must be validated in other laboratories and is not expected to be available in doctors’ offices for some years. If the technique is confirmed and does become widely available before effective interventions, it is sure to spark another chapter in an ongoing discussion about the wisdom of such predictive power.
The genetic test for Huntington’s Disease, a degenerative brain disorder, sparked the first such debate. As in the case of the Alzehimer’s test now under development, the test raises serious questions when individuals are asymptomatic or are at risk for a late-onset disease with years of healthy life ahead of them. When the Huntington’s test became available in the 1970s, fewer of those who might be affected chose to know their destiny than many expected. Since then the Huntington’s test has provided a case study and an opportunity to develop positions on the medical, psychological, and ethical problems of predictive testing.
Alarmists will worry about the social effects if large numbers of persons have access to reliable knowledge of their likely medical destiny. Will fatalism and risk-taking increase? Will political pressure for physician-assisted suicide grow? What seems at least as likely is that the same understanding of disease processes that enable predictive testing will lead to interventions that can alter their course, but not without a transition period that challenges our moral framework.
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