Optimising Cognitive Screening in General Practice

在未来的5 - 10年内，阿尔茨海默病的复杂的联合药物治疗很可能会成为可能。一旦干预药物能够影响潜在的疾病过程，准确识别那些处于认知衰退早期阶段的患者将是至关重要的。也就是说，未能在早期阶段发现认知能力下降将降低干预的有效性，对个人和社会都是昂贵的。与此同时，为了避免不必要的检查、焦虑和痛苦以及费用，需要降低错误地识别出一个人患有阿尔茨海默病的可能性。将开发一种复杂而高度灵活的测试系统来检测记忆障碍的早期阶段。该测试将在全科医生的外科手术中通过网络进行，以便收集最感兴趣的人群（看医生的老年患者）的规范数据。将使用语音识别技术，以确保用户友好的环境。将采用严格的程序来保护隐私。该检测价格低廉，易于进行，并允许进行有效的再检测，从而可作为老年人常规健康筛查的一部分。这将是在大多数神经退行性疾病（如阿尔茨海默病）中发现的认知能力下降的更敏感和更具体的指标，并将使全科医生在评估老年患者时更有信心。它还将通过更准确地识别那些有风险的病人，减少昂贵的转诊费用。预计这项检查将被病人和他们的医生所接受，并成为老年人正常健康检查的常规部分。

Within the next 5 - 10 years it is likely that sophisticated combination pharmacotherapy for Alzheimer's disease will become available. Once intervention agents are available that affect the underlying disease process, it will be critical to accurately identify those patients who are in the earliest stages of cognitive decline. That is, failure to detect cognitive decline at an early stage will reduce the effectiveness of the intervention and be costly to the individual and society. At the same time, the probability of falsely identifying an individual as having Alzheimer's disease needs to be reduced in order to avoid unnecessary testing, anxiety and distress, and expense. A sophisticated and highly flexible testing system to detect the earliest stages of memory impairment will be developed. The test will be administered over the web in a general practitioner's surgery enabling the collection of normative data on the population of greatest interest (elderly patients seeing their doctor). Voice recognition technology will be used in order to insure a user friendly environment. Stringent procedures to protect privacy will be employed. The test will be inexpensive and easy to take and will allow valid retesting so that it can be used as part of the routine health screening for the elderly. This will be a far more sensitive and specific indicator of the cognitive decline found in most neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease, and will enable general practitioners to be more confident in assessing their older patients. It will also reduce costly referrals by more accurately identifying those patients at risk. It is expected that the test will find acceptance amongst patients and their doctors and become a routine part of normal health screening for the elderly.