How To Actually Access Early Dementia Screening

It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!

Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!

In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!

As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!

So, no question/request too big or small 😎

❝Hi, do you know where you can get early dementia testing done in the UK? Great job on the newletter.❞

Thank you for the kind words!

With regard to early dementia testing in the UK, we have good and bad news:

The bad news

The NHS does not love to offer dementia testing:

• they will first try to dismiss any concerns ← not official policy, but we imagine you know how it is
• they will offer cognitive assessment tests, to test your mental abilities. If these give any cause for concern, then…
• they will offer an array of unrelated blood tests “to rule out other causes of symptoms that can be confused with dementia”
• if you have dementia symptoms and the unrelated blood tests didn’t bring anything else up, then they may do an MRI:

An MRI scan is recommended to:

• help confirm a diagnosis of dementia and the type of disease causing the dementia
• provide detailed information about the blood vessel damage that happens in vascular dementia
• show shrinkage in specific areas of the brain – for example, the frontal and temporal lobes are mainly affected by shrinkage in frontotemporal dementia, while usually just the temporal lobes are affected in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease

Source: NHS: Tests for diagnosing dementia

Those cognitive assessment tests, by the way, you can get a head start if you like; here’s the industry’s gold standard test (it’s free):

SAGE: A Test to Detect Signs of Alzheimer’s and Dementia

(The Self-Administered Gerocognitive Exam (SAGE) is designed to detect early signs of cognitive, memory or thinking impairments)

See also: Is It Dementia? Spot The Signs (Because None Of Us Are Immune)

The good news

For actual early dementia screening based on blood, there’s a clinical trial that’s right now accepting volunteers to sign up for it:

❝Two expert research teams, one from University College London and the other from Dementias Platform UK at the University of Oxford, will conduct UK-wide clinical trials to identify blood tests to boost dementia diagnosis. The two studies will take complementary approaches:

The READ-OUT study will be led by Dr Vanessa Raymont, Associate Director of Dementias Platform UK and a clinical researcher based at the University of Oxford.  Her team will test multiple existing and novel blood tests for a range of types of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, vascular dementia, frontotemporal dementia, and dementia with Lewy bodies. The researchers will also look at whether these blood tests can help detect these diseases at various stages.

The second study will be led by Prof Jonathan Schott and Dr Ashvini Keshavan, who are both based at University College London. Their study, ADAPT, will focus on the most promising test for Alzheimer’s disease, which measures levels of a protein called p-tau217. This increases in the blood as other proteins build up in the brain during the development of Alzheimer’s disease. The researchers will carry out a clinical trial to see whether measuring p-tau217 in the blood increases the rate of diagnosis for Alzheimer’s disease both in people with early dementia. It will also involve those with mild, progressive problems with memory.❞

Source: Two revolutionary studies set to bring blood tests for dementia a step closer to NHS ← published literally today, at time of writing; you timed your question well!

Here’s the sign-up form for that: Blood Biomarker Challenge Registration Form

Not from the UK?

We appreciate that most of our readers are from N. America, so normally we cater particularly to what’s most relevant for most of our readers. Of course, if someone asks a specific question that pertains to somewhere else, we’ll do our best to answer it, as we did today.

However! If you are, for example, in the US or Canada, then the above-mentioned tests are still the ones you want to ask your doctor about,

You can also refer to the tests we discussed in the article that surely prompted today’s question, here:

Early Dementia Screening From Your Blood & More

Take care!