Looking Through the Eye and into Alzheimer’s Disease
By Peter Jeffrey Snyder
The retina can reveal subtle signs of disease long before cognitive and behavioral symptoms appear.
This Article From Issue
March-April 2026
Volume 114, Number 2
Page 104
A person visiting an eye doctor for an annual exam sits in front of a desktop machine equipped with a chin rest, headrest, and eyepiece. The patient is told to hold still while one eye, then the other, is briefly scanned by an infrared light–based method that captures more than a thousand remarkably detailed cross-sectional images of the retina within seconds.
QUICK TAKE
- Alzheimer's disease is difficult to diagnose in its early stages because it begins with a long “silent” period that produces no obvious changes in health, behavior, or cognition.
- Screening people who are known to be at risk before they exhibit symptoms would open new opportunities for treatment to halt, slow, or more effectively manage the disease.
- Subtle changes in the retina, which can be detected via a routine eye exam years before the full onset of Alzheimer’s disease, may offer an affordable, noninvasive screening method.
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