Prevention may be a cure to Alzheimer’s
Study finds way to detect disease early to help prevent brain damage from worsening
Prevention may really be the cure when it comes to Alzheimer’s disease, and a study has identified a new way of detecting the disease early — and potentially helping to fight Alzheimer’s before its onset.
The study from Concordia University in Montreal might also shed some light on those crazy old aunts and uncles who tell it like it is; the fact that they don’t censor what they say might not be a trait of someone who just doesn’t give a hoot any more, but a sign of a real cognitive problem.
Erin Johns, a doctoral student in psychology at Concordia, knows that the problem with treating Alzheimer’s is that it is almost impossible to reverse brain damage. But if you could detect that someone was on the path to Alzheimer’s early enough, maybe it would be easier to prevent the damage.
“We wanted to help provide more reliable tools to identify people who are at increased risk for developing Alzheimer’s so that they can be targeted for preventive strategies that would stop brain damage from progressing,” she said. “The reason Alzheimer’s is so difficult to treat is because it’s usually detected too late. You can’t intervene after the brain damage has already occurred, you need to prevent those brain cells from dying.”
In her study, published in the Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, she focused on older adults with mild cognitive impairment ( MCI). But rather than just studying memory function, she looked at executive functions — like attention, planning and problem- solving — because adults with MCI have a high risk of developing Alzheimer’s.
Whereas standard screening detected impairments in only 15 per cent of those with MCI, when they tested for executive function deficits they found the 40 adults with MCI were impaired in at least one function and almost half performed poorly in all the executive function tests.
Executive function tests measure skills like divided attention, inhibitory control, verbal fluency and problemsolving. Inhibitory control showed the greatest and most frequent deficit.