A New Blood Test May Predict Your Alzheimer’s Risk. Should You Take It?

Typically, doctors look at several factors to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease: a patient’s medical history, cognitive and functional assessments, brain imaging scans, and spinal tap or blood tests. So a person who takes Quest’s test and receives a result indicating an elevated risk would need additional testing to determine whether they in fact have Alzheimer’s. “When people order this test, the next steps are not inconsequential,” says Joseph Ross, a primary care physician and health policy researcher at Yale School of Medicine.

There are measures a person can take to lower their…