Assessing the Sociocultural Impacts of Emerging Molecular Technologies for the Early Diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease

摘要

Novel technologies for early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) will impact the waysociety views and deals with AD and ageing. However, such “sociocultural” impacts arehardly acknowledged in standard approaches of technology assessment. In this paper, weoutline three steps to assess such broader impacts. First, conceptual analysis of the ideasunderlying technological developments shows how these technologies redraw the boundarybetween Alzheimer's disease and normal ageing and between biological and socialapproaches of ageing. Second, imaginative scenarios are designed depicting differentpossible futures of AD diagnosis and societal ways to deal with ageing and the aged. Third,such scenarios enable deliberation on the sociocultural impact of AD diagnostictechnologies among a broad set of stakeholders. An early, broad, and democratic assessmentof innovations in diagnostics of AD is a valuable addition to established forms of technologyassessment.