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Stephen G. Post, PhD; Peter J. Whitehouse, MD, PhD
Case Western Reserve University Cleveland, Ohio

JAMA. 1997;278(12):979.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

In Reply.

—We share Dr Tracy's hopes for a future in which preventive or delaying antidementia strategies are applied widely in asymptomatic individuals at higher risk for AD, which is a tremendous public health problem. However, although many exciting ideas exist about how to delay onset of AD, none are proven. Certainly prevention or a delay of onset are strategies increasingly within reach and of obvious moral and social value.¹ If some potentially AD-preventing compounds were to have adverse effects, then defining high-susceptibility subpopulations based on genetic testing would be laudable. But no link has yet been established between genotype (eg, the presence or absence of an APOE 4 allele) and efficacy of potential therapies.

From our focus group activities, it appears that many, if not most, caregivers would proceed with a susceptibility test only if preventive or delaying compounds are better established and much more clearly related to genotype than . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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