Cognitive Problems Could be an Early Indicator of Alzheimer’s Disease

Problems in processing semantic or knowledge-based information could be an early indicator of Alzheimer’s disease and could also play a vital role in how the patients function later on in their lives, a new study reveals.

Terry Goldberg, PhD, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at the Hofstra North Shore-LIJ School of Medicine and director of neurocognition at the Litwin Zucker Center for Research in Alzheimer's Disease and Memory Disorders at The Feinstein Institute for Medical Research in Manhasset, NY, said that clinicians have observed other types of cognitive problems in MCI patients but no one had ever studied it in a systematic way.

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Many experts had noted individuals who seemed perplexed by even the simplest task. In this latest study, investigators used a clever series of tests to measure a person's ability to process semantic information.

Do people with MCI have trouble accessing different types of knowledge? Are there obvious semantic impairments that have not been picked up before? The answer was "yes."

In setting out to test the semantic processing system, Dr. Goldberg and his colleagues needed a task that did not involve a verbal response. That would only confuse things and make it harder to interpret the results. They decided to use size to test a person's ability to use semantic information to make judgments between two competing sets of facts.

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"If you ask someone what is bigger, a key or an ant, they would be slower in their response than if you asked them what is bigger, a key or a house," explained Dr. Goldberg. The greater the difference in size between two objects, the faster a person-normal or otherwise-can recognize the difference and react to the question.

Investigators brought in 25 patients with MCI, 27 patients with Alzheimer's and 70 cognitively fit people for testing. They found large differences between the healthy controls and the MCI and Alzheimer's patients. "This finding suggested that semantic processing was corrupted," said Dr. Goldberg. "MCI and AD (Alzheimer's disease) patients are really affected when they are asked to respond to a task with small size differences."

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They then tweaked the task by showing pictures of a small ant and a big house or a big ant and a small house. This time, the MCI and AD patients did not have a problem with the first part of the test-they were able to choose the house over the ant when asked what was bigger. But if the images were incongruent - the big ant seemed just as big as the small house - they were confused, they answered incorrectly or took longer to arrive at a response.

Dr. Goldberg said the finding is critically important because it may be possible to strengthen these semantic processing connections through training. "It tells us that something is slowing down the patient and it is not episodic memory but semantic memory," he said. They will continue to study these patients over time to see if these semantic problems get worse as the disease advances.

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The study has been published in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

Source-ANI