New, Inexpensive Way to Predict Alzheimer’s Disease

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI)) is a condition that affects language, memory, and related mental functions. Distinct from the ordinary mental degradation associated with aging, MCII is thought to be a likely precursor to the Alzheimer’s disease. Both MCI and Alzheimer’s are linked to a steady decline in the volume of the hippocampus, the area of the brain responsible for long term memory and spatial reasoning.  Michael Wenger, from Pennsylvania State University (Pennsylvania, USA), and colleagues have developed a low-cost behavioral assessment that examines information processing capacity to detect changes in the progression of MCI.  As compared to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), the most reliable and direct way to detect hippocampal atrophy and diagnose MCI but is an expensive procedure, the team applied a model suggesting that capacity may be a more sensitive indicator of the underlying atrophy than speed of processing.  They adapted a standard behavioral measure of memory (the free and cued selective reminding test, FCSRT) to allow for the collection of cued recall latencies, and found that MCI subjects showed the greatest sensitivity that highlighted the cognitive difference they experienced.