Medpundit

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Wednesday, December 11, 2002

Home Testing: In England, you can buy home tests to screen for colon cancer, osteoporosis, and Alzheimer's. That's amazing. We don't even have a doctor-ordered test here to screen for Alzheimer's. They don't really have them in England, either:

One Alzheimer's test, for example, is simply a selection of "scratch and sniff" cards, in which various scents have to be identified.

A consultant psychiatrist asked by Health Which? said that while losing sense of smell was a symptom of Alzheimer's, smell testing did not figure in scientific evaluation of possible cases of dementia.

The osteoporosis screen is also of dubious merit:

The "osteoporosis risk indicator" looked for the presence of high levels of a particular protein in the urine.

However, experts confirmed that levels of this protein fluctuated naturally.

There's something to be said for the FDA. It protects us from scams like this.

posted by Sydney on 12/11/2002 08:15:00 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, December 11, 2002

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