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Wagamaga OP t1_is5b5zg wrote

Research published today in Alzheimer's & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer's Association, the team analysed data from the UK Biobank and found impairment in several areas, such as problem solving and number recall, across a range of conditions.

The findings raise the possibility that in the future, at-risk patients could be screened to help select those who would benefit from interventions to reduce their risk of developing one of the conditions, or to help identify patients suitable for recruitment to clinical trials for new treatments.

There are currently very few effective treatments for dementia or other neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease. In part, this is because these conditions are often only diagnosed once symptoms appear, whereas the underlying neurodegeneration may have begun years – even decades – earlier. This means that by the time patients take part in clinical trials, it may already be too late in the disease process to alter its course.

https://alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/alz.12802

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applejacklover97 t1_is6s6nk wrote

If you’re like me and immediately wondered “can they do something about it when they find it? why exactly are they looking?” here’s what the paper notes as the use for this data:

> Identifying pre-diagnostic functional and cognitive changes could improve selection for preventive and early disease-modifying treatment trials.

ETA: Just realized this is covered in OP’s comment, but I want to keep the quote from the article up anyway. Super cool stuff. My grandpa has Parkinson’s. Thanks for posting OP :)

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Anustart15 t1_is8hedj wrote

As someone that has worked in neurodegeneration research, the ability to set up trials to actually start treating someone very very early into onset, it would be much easier to see efficacy.

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SerialStateLineXer t1_is8ytw2 wrote

It's not clear how useful this is as a diagnostic tool when the differences they found are well within the range of normal variation. If you have a patient who has a fluid intelligence score 0.5 standard deviations below average, is that a person of formerly average intelligence who's in the early stages of cognitive decline, or a person who was always a bit below average? Or maybe a person who started out well above average and has undergone severe decline?

I think you'd have to test patients multiple times over a period of years to get good diagnostic information out of this.

Also, does anyone know what the scale of the fluid intelligence score is? Like what's the mean and standard deviation for control subjects? Eyeballing Figure 1, it looks like the standard deviation might be two points?

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CitizenEveryone t1_itqvvmo wrote

Given that there is no cure and no treatment for dementia, I suspect that at least some doctors won't care about predicting it. Among those who do, maybe they'll tell you and maybe they won't. With no treatment or cure, some doctors diagnose only to effectively say adios, as did mine.

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