What to Expect
No single test can diagnose Alzheimer's disease. Doctors must utilize many different tools to determine whether someone has the disease, but in most cases, physicians begin with a memory and performance test like the MMSE (Mini-Mental State Examination).

The MMSE tests a person's ability to understand, remember, communicate and think using questions like:
What is today's date?
What day of the week is it?
What is the season?
What state are we in?
What city?

Watch a clip from The Forgetting: [ 56k broadband ]
This clip shows Dr. Steven DeKosky conducting the MMSE with patient Gladys Fuget. Gladys is well into the early stages of Alzheimer's and is visibly experiencing obvious difficulties with her memory.

Other Testing Tools
Physical exams, psychological tests and a patient's medical history are also crucial to the diagnostic process. Someone familiar with recent events should accompany the patient to the office. The history of memory loss progression is an important piece of the diagnosis.
If results are still unclear, brain imaging such as CAT scans or MRI scans can help rule out other possible causes. Sophisticated brain scans like PET scans can identify activity decreases in hippocampus activity, the first part of the brain attacked by Alzheimer's. In fact, the hippocampus actually shrinks early in Alzheimer's disease.

Slice of Pre-Clinical Alzheimer's Brain

Slice of Early-Stage Alzheimer's Brain