- Early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease is important to have time for medications and lifestyle interventions to help slow disease progression.
- Research has shown that people with MCI who experience memory problems are more likely to go on to develop Alzheimer’s disease.
- A new study shows that a three-minute noninvasive test can help identify memory issues in people with mild cognitive impairment.
Researchers continue to look for new ways of diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease early — a type of dementia currently affecting about
“Alzheimer’s disease is diagnosed up to 20 years too late,” George Stothart, PhD, cognitive neuroscientist and senior lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Bath in the U.K., and principal scientist at Cumulus Neuroscience Ltd., told Medical News Today.
“If we can diagnose earlier, we can do three really important things: Allow people to implement lifestyle modifications that have been shown to slow disease progression … allow access to the new disease-modifying drugs earlier when they’re likely to be more effective, (and) improve drug development itself by improving patient identification and stratification in clinical trials,” he said.
Stothart is the first author of a new study that shows how a three-minute non-invasive test can be used to help identify memory issues in people with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), which many times can lead to Alzheimer’s disease.
This study was recently published in the journal Brain Communications.
This study focuses on a noninvasive test called Fastball EEG that works by recording the electrical activity in the brain when a person looks at certain images.
“Fastball is a passive test of the automatic way in which your brain recognizes objects,” Stothart explained. “It doesn’t require you to do anything other than watch a screen with flashing images. Occasionally, these images repeat, and by measuring your brainwaves with an EEG (electroencephalogram) cap, we can measure how well your memory is working.”
For the study, researchers recruited 53 older adults with diagnosed MCI and another 54 Healthy older adults to act as the control group. All participants completed a three-minute Fastball test, as well as neuropsychological assessments of memory, sustained attention, and general cognitive function.
At the end of the study, Stothart and his team found that Fastball was able to reliably recognize memory issues in participants with MCI.
“People with MCI who have memory problems are more likely to go on to develop Alzheimer’s disease than those without memory problems,” Stothart said. “These people also had low Fastball scores, this means we may be able to use Fastball to identify very early Alzheimer’s disease. The passive nature of the task also means we are able to avoid common confounds of traditional memory tests, i.e. anxiety, education, language, and culture.”
Researchers also found during this study that the Fastball EEG test could be used outside of a hospital or clinic, including in a person’s home.
“Traveling to a hospital and completing traditional cognitive assessments can be stressful for some people,” Stothart explained.
Testing at home may be possible“By testing Fastball at home, we keep people comfortable and relaxed. This helps to reduce anxiety which we know can affect performance on traditional measures of memory and thinking — it can be difficult to know what you’re measuring when someone is stressed, are you truly measuring their memory, or are you measuring how well they can complete a test under stress? Those are cognitively different things.”
— George Stothart, PhD
“We are in the middle of two four-year, large-scale, clinical validation studies, testing Fastball with over 2,000 patients in the U.K.,” Stothart continued.
“To deliver these large studies we are partnering with Cumulus Neuroscience Ltd. These large-scale studies will provide us with the essential accuracy data to allow us to go to healthcare providers with evidence of the task’s sensitivity and specificity, both of these large validation studies conclude in 2027,” he added.
MNT spoke with Peter Gliebus, MD, director of cognitive and behavioral neurology at Marcus Neuroscience Institute, a part of Baptist Health, about this study, who commented that he found it promising because it introduces a quick, noninvasive, and objective method to measure recognition memory, which is sensitive to early memory impairments in conditions like mild cognitive impairment.
“Its ability to detect amnestic deficits passively, without relying on language or cultural factors, makes it a practical and equitable tool for early diagnosis,” Gliebus continued.
“Early detection (of Alzheimer’s disease) is critical because Alzheimer’s disease begins years before symptoms appear, and early intervention with new treatments is most effective during this stage. Current diagnostic tools (e.g., PET scans, cerebrospinal fluid biomarkers) are costly, invasive, and not widely accessible. Early diagnosis allows patients to plan for their future and access treatments sooner, potentially slowing disease progression.”
— Peter Gliebus, MD
Gliebus said he would still like to see longer follow-up studies to confirm the prognostic value of Fastball in predicting Alzheimer’s progression over several years, as well as integration with
“Combine Fastball with blood-based or structural biomarkers to enhance diagnostic accuracy,” he continued. “Larger and diverse populations — test the method in larger, more diverse groups to ensure its reliability across different demographics. (And) develop guidelines for integrating Fastball into routine clinical practice, similar to how ECGs are used for heart health.”
MNT also spoke with Clifford Segil, DO, a neurologist at Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, CA, about this research.
“The authors aim to diagnose dementia early by using an abnormal electrical finding called a p300, or a
parietal lobe electric potential , is challenging to expect to have any clinical utility in the future. The goal of replacing a clinical evaluation with something using an electrical brain potential is unwise as it will produce false positive findings.”
— Clifford Segil, DO
“Electrical brain potentials help diagnose patients with abnormal brain electricity called seizures and are unlikely to provide any clinical benefits in the early diagnosis of dementia patients who rarely if ever have a seizure disorder or abnormal brain electricity,” he continued.
“A routine EEG should be used in the same patient population, in which the authors are claiming an abnormal parietal lobe electrical potential. A whole brain EEG will see if this p300 change is correlated with any other brain electrical potential in different parts of the brain, which work abnormally in patients with Alzheimer’s dementia, like their temporal or frontal lobes,” he added.
