Sandy Hausman reports “The first thing we do is a regular MRI, which just looks at the structure of the brain to see, ‘Is there a lot of atrophy or brain shrinkage? Is there a lesion in the brain that would be the reason that the person is having cognitive decline.” And they can look for fragments of protein in the brain called amyloid. “There are certain PET scans where we can look at the amount of amyloid in the brain, and that is a marker of Alzheimer’s Disease,” Manning says. Sometimes the findings suggest typical, age-related changes. “Normal age related decline includes things like forgetting names -- very, very common. Proper nouns – common to have a harder time with that.” Manning explains.