Preventing Alzheimer’s Disease Using Groundbreaking Diagnostics | Gillian Coughlan | TEDxVienna

[Music] would you like to know if you are going to be stripped of your personal memories by Alzheimer's disease this devastating condition affects up to 50 million of us globally the biggest risk factor for Alzheimer's disease is age and for the first time in history there are more people over the age of 65 then there are under the age of five making Alzheimer's disease one of the greatest challenges of our time now Alice Alzheimer's pictured here in the left discovered the disease over a hundred and ten years ago nevertheless the current recovery rate for Alzheimer's disease patients is 0% why is that the reason is that every single treatment child into slow or halt the growth of neurotoxic proteins that characterize the disease that you can see here in the middle have failed the reason for that scientists think is that treatment is simply administered too late despite scientific advances in medical technology such as posture on emission tomography scans and cerebral spinal fluid evaluations that can detect early disease growth as it begins to accumulate here in the medial temporal lobes in green these methods are simply not suitable to screen the mass population for Alzheimer's disease because they're expensive time-consuming and they often carry a very nasty side effects so what then are we going to do for the 50 million people that will develop Alzheimer's disease by 2005 50 well from my doctoral studies I wanted to revolutionize the way we detect the very first stages of Alzheimer's disease now I believe as do many other scientists across the globe that one of the very first symptoms of Alzheimer's disease is in fact spatial disorientation the reason for that is that the areas are the brain areas that Alzheimer's disease affect first contains cells responsible for how we navigate space so we can then try to measure the functioning of these cells using navigation tasks in order to find those early cognitive signs of those newer toxic proteins that we saw earlier now one challenge were using spatial navigation as for early detection is that scientists first need to understand inter-individual differences in spatial navigation ability do all individuals navigate the same way and with the same efficiency are men really better navigators than women these remain unanswered questions so given that we understand loss of navigation skill is very likely a first symptom of alzheimerís disease and the awareness that we need to understand population level navigation behavior we developed a gaming app called sea hero quest to measure population level navigation behavior now it might surprise you to know that we currently spend more than three billion hours each week playing video games so it only makes sense for scientists use this time and record how people navigate while they're gaming the sea hero crest game records people spatial navigation performance using an immersive virtual reality environment like you can see in the video here and it challenges different processes of the human navigation system as you can see the game is very visually appealing so it's not like your standard thinking or cognitive test in fact when the game was made freely available to download via the Android and Apple Play Store in 2015 it was downloaded by more than four and a half million people across a hundred and sixty three different countries providing me and many other scientists with a uniquely rich database for understanding variation in population level navigation behavior so you'll never guess what we found we found that indeed age sex and Nationality which you can see we're recorded in the game have a strong influence on your navigation skill so how well you navigate will at least partly depend on your age your sex and your nationality this is really important because it means when I'm trying to diagnose or determine what an Alzheimer's disease related navigation deficit is then I need to be accounting for these kind of personalized factors so equip with this knowledge I you see here request in my experimental studies but a lot because I believe that this game had prognostic value and could give us really important clues about who is a high-risk candidate for Alzheimer's disease based on how they navigate in the sea Hero Quest game now we know that genes are in a very important risk factor for dementia so I recruited participants you carry a specific variation of the apolipoprotein gene which means that there are at least three to four times more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease than the general population what I found is that those of us at genetic risk for Alzheimer's disease actually travel a further distance in the sea heroquest game but why is that I ask myself so in the next step I generated the exact spatial trajectories that were taken by the high risk and the low risk genetic risk genetic groups and I found that the reason the high genetic risk group was traveling a further distance in the sea hero question is because people at high genetic risk tend to travel more along the border of the sea heroquest environment while people at low genetic risk tend to travel more along the center of the sea heroquest environments as you can see in the two examples I have above this is really important because the high genetic risk group have no memory problems so clinically they are deemed healthy despite already showing some abnormal navigation patterns in the sea heroquest game so I then used the big data we collected through the Play Store to create a highly personalized benchmark which could then determine if someone spatial navigation performance was deviating from that of their age gender and Nationality match peers again as you can see in the illustration above despite this recent discovery current diagnosis for Alzheimer's disease is still strongly based on memory which we know now is not affected until the disease is really quite advanced and I want to change this we have seen that by using population level navigation data like generated here we can identify high risk and after just 10 minutes of gameplay at a very low cost in comparison to expensive brain scans and although there's more work that needs to be done I strongly believe that by creating these kind of personalized cognitive evaluations and tailoring diagnostic tools to patients personal characteristics we can identify those high-risk individuals early so that they can be enrolled in treatment trials and treatment can actually have a beneficial effect but the future of Alzheimer's disease it's not only in the hands of doctors and scientists but it's also determined by you so now I'm going to tell you two ways that you can contribute to the fight against dementia firstly you can contribute to generating this kind of population level that navigation data that we have seen is so useful in medical research by playing the virtual reality version of the C Hero Quest game that is currently available on the oculus store so as you can see a video of it playing here it actually offers us a number of advantages as it provides an even more immersive experience in a setting that will bring us even closer to real-world avocation so for example in order to actually look around you have to move your head and we can track head movements now we know that head movements are a very important part of the human allegation system so we expect a whole new set of very exciting data coming from the virtual reality version of C heroquest secondly each and every one of you can actively play a role in reducing your own risk of developing Alzheimer's disease epidemiological study teachers that by getting adequate rest by getting adequate nutrition by training your brain with cognitively stimulating tasks and building up your brains cognitive reserve and in general by leading a healthy lifestyle you can statistically reduce your risk of dementia by at least 35% thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 23,324

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Science, Aging, Brain, Memory, Technology

Id: GMhKRFglWB8

Length: 12min 3sec (723 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 02 2020