August 20, 2010
August 20, 2010 | by James Cavuoto, editor
August 20, 2010
The neurotechnology market for diagnosing and treating Alzheimer’s disease and related cognitive disorders received a boost recently with the publication of new research and new initiatives to identify biomarkers for the disease.
The National Institute on Aging, in conjunction with the Alzheimer’s Association, earlier this month released reports from three workgroups convened to update diagnostic criteria for the first time since 1984. The three workgroups covered Alzheimer’s disease dementia, mild cognitive impairment due to Alzheimer’s disease, and preclinical Alzheimer’s disease.
The NIA report proposes a new understanding of the disease which more closely matches clinical progression with a range of disease biomarkers. It also includes patients who meet clinical and cognitive criteria but who are negative for certain genetic, molecular, or structural biomarkers.
The report is good news for Neuronetrix, the Louisville, KY manufacturer of brain analysis systems, who publicly demonstrated their Cognision system for the first time at the Alzheimer’s Association annual meeting earlier this month. “This is a tremendous opportunity for Neuronetrix as our test directly measures the electrical activity associated with cognition and is independent of biochemical pathway,” said Mauktik Kulkarni, director of research and clinical studies for Neuronetrix.
Neuronetrix previously completed a pilot clinical study with Alzheimer’s patients and healthy controls at the Sanders-Brown Alzheimer’s Disease Center at the University of Kentucky. The study validated the high data quality and ease-of-use of the Cognision system in a clinical setting. Neuronetrix will soon be initiating a large multi-center clinical study which will validate their ERP biomarkers as an accurate and reliable measure of cognitive impairment.
Meanwhile, a recent article in the journal PLOS One reported that a Posit Science brain fitness program has been shown to improve memory in older adults, at least in the period soon after training. The findings are the first to show that practicing simple visual tasks can improve the accuracy of short-term, or “working” visual memory. The research, led by scientists at UCSF, is also one of the first to measure both mental performance and changes in neural activity caused by a cognitive training program.
In the study, healthy older participants trained on a computer game designed to boost visual perception. After 10 hours of training, they not only improved their perceptual abilities significantly, but also increased the accuracy of their visual working memory by about 10 percent—bringing them up to the level of younger adults. Few brain training programs have been subjected to such rigorous research evaluation to reveal such a transfer of benefits, the researchers say.
Working memory is the ability to hold information in mind for brief periods. It is essential to accomplish immediate tasks, such as engaging in conversation with several people.
If improvements in a simple perception skill can transfer to a higher-level function such as memory, as this research found, then other interventions might further improve brain function in aging people, the scientists say.
The researchers recorded participants’ brain activity before and after the visual perception training, and found a direct link between improved performance and changes in brain activity. After the training, activity had decreased in a key brain area involved in processing visual input. The people who improved the most in the visual training showed the biggest drop in neural activity—as if the brain didn’t have to work as hard to take in information.
