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A new non-invasive and affordable test to detect Alzheimer’s has been developed. Scientists say that the simple test can detect electrical activity inside the brain and could anticipate the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease in people.

Scientists at the University of Texas discovered a unique variation in the brain waves of the people who have amnestic mild cognitive impairment. These people are twice as likely to develop the Alzheimer’s disease in their specific age group.

These new discoveries reveal a delayed neural activity pattern that is linked directly to the seriousness of deterioration in the cognitive performance on a task regarding word finding and may reveal the early stages of the disease.

Damaged episodic memory, the capacity to retain new recollections like recent events, upcoming appointments and recent conversations are symptoms of the Alzheimer’s disease. The new diagnostic method uses electroencephalogram technology which is a non-invasive and affordable approach to analyze the neural response while people in the test access long-term memory or semantic memory.

John Hart, director of Medical Science from the Centre for BrainHealth said that this is an intriguing beginning for looking at a number of MCI patients. The goal for this, long-term, is to apply this kind of method on individuals someday. The research revealed that people with aMCI performed much less accurately and a lot slower in the semantic memory exam than the control group.

When the scientists took into consideration the performance in the evaluation of episodic memory, they discovered that the worse the performance of the episodic memory was, the bigger the delayed activity was revealed in the EEG.

16 people with aMCI and 17 other healthy controls, matching the age of the patients were used in the study. The people were monitored with EEG and were given word pairs which described the features of some objects or were simply paired randomly. For instance, the words “desert” and “lumps” would have triggered the “camel” word. However, “monitor” and “humps” would have been regarded as a random pair.

The people in the study were then asked to show by the press of a button if the pair of words created the memory of an object or not. The lead author of the study, Hsueh-Sheng Chiang and previously a student at the Centre for BrainHealth and at the time a post-doctoral from the UT Southwestern Medical Centre said that many of the research regarding aMCI was focused more on the mind at rest. However, the new study focuses on looking at the brain while it’s involved in a process of object memory retrieval. Chiang added that this new method can give new information regarding the diagnosis of stages of pre-dementia, such as MCI and can identify the early stages of Alzheimer’s.

The new research was released in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.

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The Alzheimer’s disease is responsible for around 70 percent of all Dementia cases. People who suffer from this disease have an expectancy of life of around three to nine years, after being diagnosed. A recent study claims that some bio-makers may be an indication of an early onset of the Alzheimer’s disease, long before any symptoms begin to appear.

In some cases, it looks like the disease is doing its job in a person’s mind, however it may take years for any actual symptoms to form and begin to appear.

Researchers at the Indiana University said that the most recognizable genetic variant linked to the disease could be multiplying plaque accumulations on a person’s brain way before any symptoms of Alzheimer’s can be identified through the use of tests.

The new research focuses more on ‘significant memory concerns’, on older people who have issues recalling memories. For instance, these people may have had problems in the recent months or years but when being exposed to standard memory and cognition tests they would be categorized within the normal ranges. Scientists classified the people under this category as being ‘subjective cognitive decline group’.

Andrew J. Saykin, Psy.D and Shannon L. Risacher, the authors of the study, have analyzed the data gathered from around 600 ADNI candidates and distinguished those with the APOE e4 gene. Scientists found pathologies the same as Alzheimer’s with the help of numerous biomarkers in the carriers of the APOE e4 gene within the ‘significant memory group’ which also included high levels of the amyloid plaque. The amyloid plaque is the mass of fragments of protein which are regularly seen in the brain tissue of people suffering from the Alzheimer’s disease.

Scientists came to the conclusion that a damaged level of protein in the cerebrospinal fluid shows that the protein was actually being used inside the brain as part of the developing process of the plaque. A higher level of tau, a different protein also connecting to Alzheimer’s, was also spotted in the cerebrospinal fluid. But despite this, the study didn’t discover any real proof of brain structures atrophy or reduced levels of glucose metabolism which are known to be connected to the later phases of the development of Alzheimer’s.

Risacher believes that there is great room for more research among people who are at a very high risk of developing Alzheimer’s. The study was published in the Alzheimer’s and Dementia journal.

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