For the first time in nearly 30 years, NIH has updated its diagnostic guidelines for Alzheimer’s disease and changed its research guidelines for earlier stages of the disease, broadening the conceptual framework for thinking about Alzheimer’s disease.
The National Institutes of Health and the Alzheimer’s Association led the development of the newly released guidelines, appearing in 4 papers published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association. The guidelines were established through expert panels over the course of two years followed by a comment period.
The original guidelines viewed Alzheimer’s as having a single stage, whereas the new principles introduce 3 distinct stages: the preclinical, describing a phase where symptoms are not yet evident, the mild cognitive impairment stage, where symptoms first emerge, and Alzheimer’s Dementia, the final stage of the disease. The new way of looking at the disease reflects research that indicates changes in the brain can happen up to a decade before symptoms occur. “Alzheimer’s research has greatly evolved over the past quarter of a century. Bringing the diagnostic guidelines up to speed with those advances is both a necessary and rewarding effort that will benefit patients and accelerate the pace of research,” said National Institute on Aging Director Richard J. Hodes, M.D.
The guidelines, in order to allow for changes with new research, were purposefully left flexible. They include specific biomarkers currently used in research settings with the hope that these recommendations will evolve, becoming more clinically useful over time. “The new criteria are really extending the range of our ability to investigate this disease and eventually find the treatments that will be so necessary to avoid the epidemic of Alzheimer’s disease that we see facing us,” said William Thies of the Alzheimer’s Association.
- View the press release on the new guidelines.
- Read the guidelines in papers released by National Institute on Aging and the Alzheimer’s Association.
