A New Behavioral Test to Detect Early Risk of Alzheimer’s - Neuroscience News

Summary: Researchers have developed a simple behavioral test to measure an individual’s risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease before symptoms appear.

Before the onset of Alzheimer’s physical symptoms, the most commonly used method to measure an individual’s risk of developing the disease is through measuring levels of certain proteins, such as amyloid beta and tau proteins, in spinal fluid.

Now, a team from Caltech and the Huntington Medical Research Institutes has made progress toward developing a simple behavioral test to measure an individual’s risk of developing Alzheimer’s before any symptoms arise.

“Before the onset of the disease, by definition, cognitively healthy people do not have behavioral symptoms—and thus it’s not possible to do traditional behavioral assessments for the disease because there are no behavioral symptoms yet.

The study involved 40 people with an average age of 75 and all cognitively healthy, who underwent myriad tests related to Alzheimer’s risk: magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the brain, genome sequencing, and the aforementioned invasive spinal fluid measurements.

The colorless word is intended to unconsciously distract the participant and measure “implicit cognition.” In addition to conscious and intentional information gathering or “explicit cognition,” our brains have a separate system in which sensory information is digested without conscious awareness—this is known as implicit cognition?

“The participants in our study are cognitively healthy at the explicit level, and we measure this through a battery of neuropsychological tests,” says Hung?

“But this study’s central question is: How about their implicit cognition.

Could it be possible that their implicit cognition is more sensitive to show Alzheimer’s-related cognitive decline.

This suggests, Hung says, that the conditions that lead to Alzheimer’s may affect implicit cognition far before conscious cognition, and thus a test to measure implicit cognitive performance may be able to detect a high risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease without the need for invasive physical measurements.

The researchers emphasize that this test is not diagnostic yet—that is, this particular test cannot measure an individual’s risk for Alzheimer’s, but simply shows a correlation between the group of high-risk individuals and worse performance on the test when an unconscious distracting word is present.

“Stronger implicit interference in cognitively healthy older participants with higher risk of Alzheimer’s disease” by Shao‐Min Hung et al.

Stronger implicit interference in cognitively healthy older participants with higher risk of Alzheimer’s disease.

We thus aimed to develop a non-invasive behavioral test that targets early potential cognitive changes to gauge cognitive decline.

Specifically, we hypothesized that older cognitive healthy participants would exhibit comparable performance when the task was explicit and relied on conscious cognition.

We measured implicit interference elicited by an imperceptible distractor in cognitively healthy elderly participants with normal (low risk) and pathological (high risk) Aβ42/total tau ratio