Detecting Alzheimer's disease before symptoms emerge
"In the last decade or so, there has been a lot of work on biomarkers for early Alzheimer's disease," Han says. "There are new imaging methods that can identify neuropathological brain changes that happen early on in the course of the disease. The problem is that they are not widely available, can be invasive and are incredibly expensive. I wanted to see whether the cognitive tests I regularly use as a neuropsychologist relate to these biomarkers." Putting neuropsychological measures to the test Han and his colleagues conducted a meta-analysis of 61 studies to explore whether neuropsychological tests can identify early Alzheimer's disease in adults over 50 with normal cognition. The study, which was published in Neuropsychology Review , found that people who had amyloid plaques performed worse on neuropsychological tests of global cognitive function, memory, language, visuospatial ability, processing speed and attention/working memory/executive funct...