An article in the June 2014 issue of Managed Care examines the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force’s recent recommendation declaring that there is currently insufficient evidence to recommend early cognitive screening.
Author Susan Worley interviewed a number of experts in the field of Alzheimer’s disease treatment and research including Jason Karlawish, MD, professor of medicine, medical ethics, and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, and Associate Director of the Penn Memory Center.
“Cognitive screening in a general population is obviously wrong,” says Dr. Karlawish. “Screening really must be focused on an older population. The lower we set the age, the more we increase the chance of false positive detection. I’m in favor of screening when the probability that you are going to pick up cognitive impairment is reasonably high, and that is in the setting of practices that care for older adults. Among geriatricians, I would say, it is a fairly standard practice to assess your patients’ cognition.”
You can read the article here.