THE IMPACT OF EMOTIONS, AMBIGUITY, AND APATHY ON DECISIONMAKING IN INDIVIDUALS WITH ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE: A PROPOSAL TO FACILITATE DIAGNOSIS OF ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE

AD is the fastest-growing cause of dementia and mental illness for elders in the world (Alzheimer's, 2015). Because of this, the rush to diagnosis AD is leading to an increasing amount of false positives. One-fifth of AD diagnosis are false positives. In the U.S, 18.2 billion hours of care and 230 billion dollars are given to the AD diagnosis process (Alzheimer's, 2015). In order to combat this, this five-part proposal (known as the Cumulative Diagnostic Test of the CDT) intends to change the current diagnosis method by creating indexes that only allow the most likely cases of AD to continue with further testing. This proposal tests the emotions, apathy, and ambiguity. These variables were chosen as they have the greatest influence on the decision-making process (Sinz et al., 2008). In this proposal, 1056 data points (n=1056) from 272 healthy elderly people (control, n=272) and 784 elderly people with DAT (experimental, n=784) were analyzed and scored in the CDT, with the average score of the experimental group being 6.10/11, and the average score of the control group was 2.4/11 (Appendix). These scores are positively correlated with risk of developing AD. With this proposal, more than 46 billion dollars of AD funding can be diverted from false positives into more advanced testing. And the U.S as a whole could save about 3.72 billion hours from the diagnosis process.