Too often, Alzheimer’s disease is diagnosed years after the pathology has taken hold. However, tests and games on smartphones could make it possible to detect it at an early stage.
Alzheimer’s disease is a real scourge that affects nearly 1.2 million people in France. Worldwide, someone develops this condition every three seconds. It’s simply huge, and no one is spared! This neurovegetative disease is particularly disabling because it gradually causes the person who suffers from it to lose their cognitive faculties and autonomy. But, although there is currently no treatment to cure the disease, it is important to detect it as early as possible to be able to stem the effects and slow down its progression. However, identifying cognitive changes linked to Alzheimer’s disease in the elderly is not easy in the early stages of the pathology. Researchers at Mass General Brigham, a large hospital in the United States, looked into the question and discovered that early signs of the disease can be spotted using memory games installed on the smartphone. A simple and unrestrictive method!
In a study published in November in the journal Annals of Neurology, the scientists explain that they carried out tests on 164 people aged between 60 and 91, without cognitive impairment. However, 36 of them had high levels of amyloid, which is an early sign of Alzheimer’s disease. All volunteers were subjected to a test called BRANCH (Multi-Day Boston Remote Assessment for Neurocognitive Health) twelve minutes a day for a week. The latter included three different games on their smartphone. The first involved memorizing six street signs associated with numbers and then identifying the sign-number pairs, while the second asked participants to remember the price of several grocery items. Finally, the last game required me to remember the first names of several faces. Participants also took more standard cognitive exams, in the form of questionnaires. After observing the results, it appeared that the exercises did indeed make it possible to detect cognitive changes in seniors with high levels of amyloid – who therefore have Alzheimer’s disease at an early stage –, the latter presenting a downward learning curve.
For the moment, the BRANCH test is not intended to be offered to the general public on smartphones, it is only intended for the field of research and will be included in clinical trials. However, this is not the first study to achieve such results. A game designed in 2016, called Sea of the Hero, also makes it possible to detect the early stages of the disease, by studying the ability of players to orient themselves in a three-dimensional space – positioning and movements in space are among the first cognitive abilities to be affected in players. people with dementia. The goal is to memorize the route of a boat on a map in order to make it pass through specific points. Each player must, within a limited time, guide the boat in a three-dimensional universe following a determined route, through several difficulty levels. The game has already been tested by more than four million players around the world between 2016 and 2019. As such, it is always good to exercise your brain, including on mobile games!