WASHINGTON, D.C.: Medical professionals are much less likely to tell their patients of a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease than diagnoses of other chronic or incurable diseases such as cancer, often because of a reluctance to inflict emotional distress, a nonprofit’s annual report has found.
Less than half the people who have Alzheimer’s reported being told they had the dementia-causing disease.
This was not because the disease, which destroys people’s memories and abilities to learn, had caused them to forget. The report’s analytical methodology found that doctors and other health care providers give people their diagnosis only about 45 percent of the time. By contrast, the disclosure rate is 93 percent for diagnoses of cancers that affect the breast, colon, rectum, lung or prostate…