Mental Health | Virtual Reality IDs Patients at High Risk of Alzheimer’s Disease
Mental Health | A virtual reality (VR) test outperformed standard cognitive tests at identifying patients at high risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, according to a study published in the journal Brain.
“These results suggest a virtual reality test of navigation may be better at identifying early Alzheimer’s disease than tests we use at present in clinic and in research studies,” said researcher Dennis Chan, PhD, MD, from the department of clinical neurosciences at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.
The study was based on evidence that a brain region known as the entorhinal cortex is involved in an internal positioning system that lets people know where they are, where they have been, and how to find their way around. The entorhinal cortex is also one of the first regions damaged in Alzheimer’s disease, which may explain why wandering is an early symptom of the disease.
Researchers developed a VR navigation task in which patients wear a VR headset and walk within a simulated environment. Because the task requires entorhinal cortex function, researchers hypothesized patients with early Alzheimer’s disease would have trouble completing it.
Participants included 45 men and women with mild cognitive impairment—12 of whom had biomarkers of underlying Alzheimer’s disease in their cerebrospinal fluid—and 41 age-matched healthy controls. All underwent the navigation task.
“Biomarker-positive patients exhibited larger errors in the navigation task than biomarker-negative patients, whose performance did not significantly differ from controls participants,” researchers reported.
What’s more, the VR test was better at differentiating between low and high risk of Alzheimer’s disease in patients with mild cognitive impairment patients than paper-based tests currently considered the gold standard for diagnosis of early Alzheimer’s.
“This study provides evidence that navigation tasks may aid early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease,” researchers concluded, “and … provides the opportunity to answer the unmet need for translatable outcome measures for comparing treatment effect across preclinical and clinical trial phases of future anti-Alzheimer's drugs.”
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