Wired News: An Eye Test for Alzheimer's: "All Lee Goldstein wanted to do was finish his postdoctoral research project at a Harvard laboratory so he could get on with his career in psychiatry. But while placing a sensor in the skull of a lab mouse, he noticed something odd: The rodent's eyes were milky and clouded. The mouse had been bred to show the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, but was too young to have age-related cataracts."...
What he saw in the mouse, and later found in the eyes of people who had died from the disease, were amyloid plaques that form around the rim of the lens of the eye -- long before the same plaques in a patient's brain start to cause the symptoms of Alzheimer's.
Although Goldstein's discovery is still a long way from a diagnostic product, its potential for catching Alzheimer's very early is enormous....
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