5/31/2013 – When Will Mental Illness Be Diagnosed With a Lab Test?

At work, Robin Jones had a hard time finding the right words and making persuasive arguments to his colleagues. He’d come home and tell his wife, Anne, “Something’s different.”

“He would say his brain didn’t feel like it was working the same way it used to,” she recalls. “We said, ‘Well, why not talk to your primary care physician about it?’ And that started a cascade of events.”

Eventually, the Joneses made it to the Stanford Center for Memory Disorders, where Robin went through the standard run-up for Alzheimer’s disease, memorizing lists of words, and so on. But he did pretty well on them, says Mike Greicius, the center’s medical director and Center on Longevity faculty affiliate, better than you’d expect from someone in the early stages of the disease.

Read the full article at KQED.