WORCESTER, Mass. — Alzheimer’s Disease is a devastating diagnosis. For years, most people only found out they had it after the damage was far along.
Promising new therapies are being developed, but they are dependent on early detection.
Several groundbreaking AI tools are in the works right here in Massachusetts, making timely interventions possible.
That’s good news for Lewis Wheeler of Dorchester. His grandmother, mother, uncle, and cousin have all been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease.
“It’s like a slow death as the person loses their and who they are, their memory and their ability to speak, and ability to take care of themselves. So, it’s extremely painful for that person, but then for all the caregivers around them.”
Wheeler is encouraged by recent advances that slow disease progression.
“They seem to have really positive effects. And it seems that the earlier you start, the better, because once the disease starts to have its process in the brain, you can’t really reverse it.”
Dr. Gennady Gelman, a family medicine physician at UMass Memorial Health, said, “You need to catch it early, and we are not good about that right now as a system, as a nation. And we’re missing, I think, something like 75% of patients who have dementia and are non-diagnosed.”
UMass Memorial Health in Charlton is a test site for a new tablet-based screening tool.
It’s a quick series of questions and prompts that takes a few minutes to complete.
It is administered by a medical technician, and then the doctor can review the results.
Artificial intelligence can analyze tremors as someone writes on a tablet and measure, in milliseconds, how long it takes to complete a task.
Dr. Gelman said the patient can be identified as fine and not require any further treatment for dementia, or it can indicate that further testing is necessary.
Over time, it provides a baseline to assess whether any troubling trends are emerging.
Scientists at Worcester Polytechnic Institute are developing another tool to help diagnose Alzheimer’s Disease.
They found that artificial intelligence can analyze brain scans for Alzheimer’s with 93% accuracy.
Standing in front of a display with various brain scans, Ben Nephew, PH.D. said, “A lot of times you don’t see anything. It’s hard to see anything visually in the data, but there are differences in the image that the machine learning can pick up on.”
Nephew said they were also able to discover differences in how the disease impacts the brains of men and women.
“You could use this for drug development to figure out who the treatment works best for, in addition to clinical decision-making. So, the clinician could say, well, this drug seems to work best for you because you’re male or female.”
It’s estimated that seven million Americans have Alzheimer’s. That number is expected to grow as the population ages.
For families like Lewis Wheeler’s, these scientific advances are more than medical treatments.
They’re hope.
“If you delay it and get another couple of years, five years, whatever, of having your mind and your personality and your relationships with your friends and your family, like that’s ideal,” said Wheeler.
The doctors at UMass Memorial Health would like to see the tablet-based assessment administered to every patient over 65 during their annual physical examination.
They say that would allow them to monitor trends from year to year and hopefully pick up on problems earlier.
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