Current testing to diagnose #Alzheimer’s disease includes spinal taps, MRI’s, PET scans, and scans using special dyes, to confirm the presence of beta amyloid plaque lesions in the brain. Medicine recently recognized that Alzheimer’s can be predicted and diagnosed twenty years prior to the development of symptoms, using retinal scans to evaluate blood vessels in the back of the eye. The appearance of plaque in retinal vessels correlates with the development of beta amyloid plaque in the brain. Everyone has beta-amyloid in the brain; and the plaque and tangles typical of Alzheimer’s have also been found in the brains of elderly patients, who have no sign of cognitive decline, which has led to speculation as to how this could occur.

Alzheimer’s disease has been strongly and repeatedly linked to #chlamydia pneumonia, and PCR blood testing can diagnose a chronic chlamydia pneumonia infection. It is time for medical practitioners to perform retinal scans and PCR testing for chlamydia, to identify patients who are at risk of Alzheimer’s disease, and likely to benefit from treatment with low-dose macrolides. Retinal scans and PCR blood testing are readily available, relatively inexpensive, and far more practical and cost effective in diagnosing and predicting Alzheimer’s.

It is time to initiate #research to confirm the benefits of early treatment of chlamydia pneumonia, to prevent, forestall, or mitigate the effects of Alzheimer’s disease, in patients who have positive findings on both retinal scans and PCR blood testing.