What are your options if a new blood test says you are at risk for Alzheimer’s disease? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Let’s say you’ve taken the newly approved blood test for Alzheimer’s disease and the results indicate the presence of tau and amyloid in your brain, so you’re at risk.  Abhay Moghakar, a neurologist and blood biomarkers expert at Johns Hopkins, says while you may choose not to take currently available medications there are things you can do.

Moghakar: Lifestyle interventions have been shown to slow the progression down. Not single interventions but a combination of exercise, proper diet, addressing the vascular risk factors, multi component lifestyle interventions have been actually shown to slow the progression down or even prevent it in certain cases. Say you have high LDL cholesterol, you obviously initiate diet and exercise, try and get that cholesterol down and if you can't or if you have other risk factors then you take a statin, and we are definitely not there by any means now.  :32

Moghakar is hopeful that more effective medications, already being tested, will prove helpful. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.