(January 14, 2010 - Insidermedicine)

From London - According to a report published in the journal Cell Death & Disease, a new eye test could help produce an early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease. The new technique, tested on animals, entails eye drops consisting of  fluorescent markers that attach to the relevant retinal cells and highlight the ones that are dying. The retina is then imaged and this indicates the extent of brain cell death that occurs in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's.

From San Francisco - According to a report published in the American Journal of Public Health, elderly women who suffer cognitive impairment are frequently given unnecessary mammograms. Researchers studied over 2,000 women aged 70 and older, finding that 18% of women with severe cognitive impairment received mammography screening. The problem, however , is that to benefit from screening one must have a life expectancy of 4-5 years, whereas the severely cognitively impaired women in this study had an average life expectancy of only  3.3 years.

And finally, from California - A new blood test may be able to accurately diagnose early stage lung cancer, according to research presented at the Joint Conference for Molecular Origins of Lung Cancer. Researchers studied 28 lung cancer patients and 56 controls--people who were at high risk for the disease--using a panel of 40 potential lung cancer biomarkers. Results showed that the blood test was 92% accurate at finding stage 1 lung cancer among controls.