Research published in the July issue of Archives of General Psychiatry indicates that older adults having problems identifying common odors have an increased risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease…

Further reading:
Odor Identification Test May Help Predict Alzheimer’s Disease (2000)
Bad sense of smell may be first Alzheimer’s sign
Dulled Sense of Smell Might Predict Alzheimer’s Disease

For older adults, difficulty identifying common odors may indicate an increased risk of developing diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease.
An article recently published in the Archives of General Psychiatry documents a study by the Rush University Medical Center in Chicago that looked at the correlation between smell and mental impairment. The study tested nearly 600 people ranging in age from 54 to 100 over a period of five years on their ability to identify 12 familiar odors (onion, lemon, cinnamon, black pepper, chocolate, rose, banana, pineapple, soap, paint thinner, gasoline, and smoke)
The results:
“The people who made at least four errors on …read more

A federally funded project run by Oregon Health and Science University is placing sensor monitors in 300 homes around Portland, Oregon.
Why ?
To see if round-the-clock tracking of older person’s activities can provide clues to impeding Alzheimer’s disease.
As Dr Jeffery Kaye explained at the recent Alzheimer’s Association International Conference on Prevention of Dementia, “measuring how people fare at home – on bad days as well as good ones, not just when they’re doing their best for the doctor – may spot changes that signal someone’s at high risk long before they’re actually demented…If you only assess them once-in-a-blue-moon, you really …read more

According to a report in the New England Journal of Medicine, as mentioned in the AARP Bulletin for February 2007, two tests, in the developmental process, may enable detection of Alzheimer’s in the earliest, and therefore most treatable, stages.
When these tests, further described in the Bulletin and original article, are taken together, doctors might be able to diagnose Alzheimer’s earlier with an accuracy of 90 percent.
This report is an example of still more research that’s being done to find out what causes Alzheimer’s, how to detect it, and hopefully how to prevent or cure it.
(When checking out the AARP Bulletin report, scroll …read more

The main method to determine whether a person truly was afflicted with Alzheimer’s or not has been by doing an autopsy and examining the brain after death.  Sometimes this could be achieved by obtaining brain tissue by surgery while the person was still alive.  However, this was an invasive procedure.
Research by a team of scientists from David Geffen School of Medicine at the Univ. of California in Los Angeles indicates they have developed a non-invasive method of detecting Alzheimer’s “markers” by using a PET scan.  (Positron Emission Tomography)