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A company has started selling the first blood test to help diagnose Alzheimer’s disease, a leap for the field that could make it much easier for people to learn whether they have dementia. It also raises concern about the accuracy and impact of such life-altering news. Independent experts are leery because key test results have not been published and the test has not been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration — it’s being sold under more general rules for commercial labs. But they agree that a simple test that can be done in a doctor’s office has long been needed. (Marchione, 11/30)

A U.S. firm has announced the first diagnostic blood test designed to help detect Alzheimer’s disease, although it has not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the company has not yet published accuracy data. The test, produced by C2N Diagnostics, measures amyloid particles as well as forms of a protein indicating increased genetic risk for the disease, The Associated Press reported on Monday. It combines them in a formula with other data such as individual patients’ age to determine their risk of amyloid buildup in the brain. (Budryk, 11/30)

The anecdotes Lauren Nicholas was hearing were all similarly alarming: People with dementia were experiencing “catastrophic financial events” — often before they or their loves ones knew there was anything wrong with them. “Once you miss a bunch of payments, the bank owns your house or you can’t get credit anymore, so I think we were kind of concerned about why this is able to happen,” said Nicholas, a health economist and associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Deteriorating financial capabilities have long been considered one of the earliest signs of cognitive decline, but Nicholas noted that experts still had “relatively limited understanding of how frequent it is and when it’s happening.” (Chiu, 11/30)

People with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) who engage in as little as 10 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise a few times a week may be helping to slow the progression to Alzheimer’s or similar dementia, new research suggests. MCI, a decline in memory and thinking skills beyond what occurs normally with aging, is considered an early steppingstone to more serious dementia, although not everyone with MCI progresses to Alzheimer’s. (11/29)

A robot named Pepper is being eyed as a solution to addressing overwhelmed frontline healthcare workers and older adults living in assisted living facilities experiencing loneliness due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A University of Minnesota Duluth professor is researching the use of social robots — or gossip bots — to interact with and monitor assisted living residents. Pepper is a social robot manufactured by SoftBank Robotics based in Tokyo, Japan. Using human-like behaviors, the robots can maintain eye contact with older adults and encourage them to be more active.  (Bonvissuto, 12/1)