The Eyes Have It

An Instant Exam to Show Dementia & More!

The Hell(mouth) you say? Is this for reals? One eye exam can tell me if I have dementia?

Yep. Looks like it.

Disclaimer: This site contains opinions based upon personal (never professional) experience. Before making any decisions about your own care for dementia (or any other condition), please seek solutions with your own trusted and licensed medical, legal, financial, psychological, trade, and spiritual advisors.

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Take a peek at this free Alz resource guide from

MyVision with helpful advice from eye care experts and Roselyn, their outreach coordinator, for reaching out to us for free! The "Scoobies" are on it, y'all!

Turns out that eye care is brain care as they describe:

“When detecting Alzheimer’s, professionals use an optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) test. This is a state-of-the-art, precise, and non-invasive imaging technique that shows even the tiniest blood vessels at the back of the eyes. Some of these blood vessels are thinner than a strand of hair, so precision is critical when studying them.”

In brief (as a recent NIH study observes): "Retinal vessel density was higher in individuals with preclinical AD."

What is Preclinical AD?

That's the AD that is in your brain before you know it - and, it's also the best time to start treatment!

To start with a Preclinical diagnosis, take a look at these scans and video [22:51] both about Preclinical Alz as well as from ongoing OCTA studies by Dr. Amani Fawzi and her lab partners at Northwestern University in Chicago.

This testing also benefits anyone at risk for diabetes, macular degeneration, or glaucoma!

Now, pull up a chair and lemme share how this coulda helped dad in 2015 with his "Preclinical Alz diagnosis" (except for - oh yeah - the inconvenient fact that we didn't know this was possible).

Nevertheless, this may help you or a loved one now so never delay! Don't wait until it's too late which will be different for each person and is already higher for black patients at a 6x higher risk for vision loss for glaucoma than white patients.

See, mom and I took dad to the ophthalmologist and they gave him the traditional eye exam with a printout showing four quadrants much like in math class. The problem is that in one quadrant, there was a giant black circle where empty space shoulda been which means either something is wrong with his eyes or his brain. As my own opthal explained it:

“During fetal development, the eyes are basically stalks growing like offshoots from the brain.”

Ewwww, and way cool.

Where can I go to get the OCTA test?

So far, it's not easy, but search for ophthalmologists in your area in addition to these general eye exam resources at MyVision.

Until next time: "Be brave. Live." - ❤️ Buffy (from my fave quote in the TV show so watch it)!