Harvard doctor envisions eye test for Alzheimer's

• Goldstein has since become a faculty member at Harvard Medical School (and also a practicing physician at Brigham & Women's Hospital) and has turned that observation of the mouse's eyes into a potential new front in the war against the ravages of Alzheimer's.
• 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.
• "The most intensive area of Alzheimer's research right now is to determine how to slow the progression of it years or even decades before the plaques start to cause symptoms," says Sam Gandy, the director of the Farber Institute for Neurosciences at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia and an adviser to the Alzheimer's Association.
• "There are at least 35 drugs in development to do that right now."
• But those drugs will be useless without a tool to detect if a person has signs of the amyloid plaques before they become so large that the horrific symptoms of Alzheimer's appear -- by which point the brain has already been irreparably damaged.
• Such tests are in development, including modified PET scans and protein-detection methods that have shown some early promise.
• But both approaches are too expensive to be used as mass screening tools.
• In contrast, Goldstein's method uses a quasi-elastic light-scattering device -- basically, a low-intensity laser that he shines onto the back of a subject's eyeball.
• If a patient shows signs of amyloid in the eye, then doctors can perform PET scans to confirm the presence of the plaque in the brain, and prescribe drugs that slow the progression of the disease.