Will You Have Alzheimer’s?
The American Psychological Association announced a press release on their website, untitled “Testing for Alzheimer’s”, which immediately stirred my curiosity. Psychologists are wondering if it is possible to create a test that could predict Alzheimer’s even before the occurence of symptoms. Now I was puzzled as to which kind of test items could assess the potential development of Alzheimer’s, so I looked more into it.
Psychologists planned to use four different types of tests to assess cognitive abilities or disabilities in patients, namely paired-associate learning test, perceptual identification task, visual association test, and dichotic listening task. Most of them are based on studies that have shown that certain results are increasingly associated with future development of Alzheimer’s dementia compared to normal aging cognitive deficits. First of all, it made me wonder about the potential consequences of receiving results that you are likely to suffer from Alzheimer’s later on, especially if the reliability of the results has not been assessed yet. How reliable could the test items be in really assessing an individual’s probability of developing the disease? All of it would have to be thoroughly determined before publishing the test. Second,
I wondered about the difference between causation and correlation that we have been taught over and over again to carefully differentiate when reading research results. For example, in the paired-associate learning test, individuals try to remember pairs of words that are related or non related. In the majority of cases, people tend to remember the pairs of words that are related. Although for people that developed Alzheimer’s later on, their results for related or unrelated words were similar. Now they used these findings from a longitudinal study and thought that they could be useful in assessing which individuals are likely to suffer from Alzheimer’s. But I thought that even if you combine numerous findings form numerous different studies, the question of causality versus correlation is still applicable, especially considering the consequences of giving such compromising results to patients who may probably never develop Alzheimer’s. I believe more research should be conducted before publishing a test that can claim to predict Alzheimer’s, like they did on the APA website. Although individually, these studies may find correlations interestingly correlated to the development of the disease, I think it should be reviewed more thoroughly before making such claims in the psychological field.
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