Since the beginning of the week, the International Conference of the Alzheimer Association has been held in Boston, United States. The opportunity to take stock of the research carried out on this disease which continues to progress and affects 225,000 more each year.
We learned that by pushing back the retirement age from 60 to 65, the risk of suffering from Alzheimer’s disease decreased by 15%. But during the debates, international specialists in the disease wanted to alert public opinion to the unreliability of online screening tests.
To detect the first signs of this neurodegenerative disease earlier, many people do not hesitate to answer medical quizzes on the internet. The specialists gathered in Boston have therefore listed the 16 main self-diagnostic tests and tested them, more specifically assessing their scientific validity and the reliability of the evaluations. The result of their research fell like a cleaver: the vast majority of these tests were classified as bad or very bad by Alzheimer’s specialists.
“To be completely honest, what we found on the Internet was scary and potentially dangerous,” explained Julie Robillard, researcher at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver (Canada). » Open-access diagnostic tests that lack scientific validity and fail to comply with guidelines for taking ethical considerations into account are likely to harm a vulnerable population and have a negative impact on their health,” concluded Julie Robillard.
