Tag: MCI

A simple score may be able to determine the personal risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease

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For the first time, an international team of scientists, led by researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine, have determined that an Alzheimer’s disease (AD) polygenic risk score can be used to correctly identify adults with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) who were only in their 50s. MCI is considered a precursor to AD.

Findings were published in the February 27 online edition of Molecular Psychiatry.

The AD polygenic risk score was created from genome-wide association studies of AD with a combination of genes weighted according to the association of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) with AD. SNPs are variations of a single nucleotide or DNA-building block that occur at a specific position in the genome. There is some SNP variation in genomic information in all humans, which affects individual susceptibility to disease.

“Current studies of the AD polygenic risk score typically occur in adults in their 70s, but the AD pathological process begins decades before the onset of dementia,” said William S. Kremen, PhD, professor of psychiatry and co-director of the Center for Behavior Genetics of Aging at UC San Diego School of Medicine. “By focusing on a younger population with cognitive impairment, we may be better able to identify patients for critical early interventions and clinical trials.”

Kremen and team found that someone with an AD polygenic risk score in the upper quartile was 2.5 to 3 times more likely to have MCI than someone with a score in the lowest quartile. Signs of MCI may include difficulty with word recall, forgetting appointments, or often losing personal belongings. The type of MCI most associated with memory loss is called amnestic MCI.

According to the National Institute on Aging, more people with MCI than those without it go on to develop Alzheimer’s. Approximately eight of every 10 persons who fit the definition of amnestic MCI develop Alzheimer’s disease within seven years.

“Our research team found that the polygenic score could differentiate individuals with mild cognitive impairment from those who were cognitively normal,” said Kremen. “We also noticed that for study participants who had cognitive deficits other than memory problems, diabetes was three-fold more likely.”

Kremen added that while this test is not yet available to primary care physicians, it may be an important tool to aid researchers in predicting MCI and AD, and, eventually, reducing the number of future cases.

“The Alzheimer’s Association and others have modeled how the impact of delaying the onset of AD by five years could reduce the number of cases by nearly 50 percent by 2050. We want to do what we can to make this projection a reality,” said Kremen.

Data for this study were collected from 1,329 men who participated in the Vietnam Era Twin Study of Aging (VESTA.). VESTA constitutes a national sample comparable to U.S. men in their age range with respect to health and lifestyle characteristics. Approximately 90 percent of subjects in this analysis were in their 50s. Diagnosis of AD was based on the Jak-Bondi actuarial/neuropsychological approach.

This article has been republished from materials provided by UCSD. Note: material may have been edited for length and content. For further information, please contact the cited source.

Reference: Logue, M. W., Panizzon, M. S., Elman, J. A., Gillespie, N. A., Hatton, S. N., Gustavson, D. E., … Kremen, W. S. (2018). Use of an Alzheimer’s disease polygenic risk score to identify mild cognitive impairment in adults in their 50s. Molecular Psychiatry, 1. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-018-0030-8

The Power of Music in Alleviating Dementia Symptoms

On By A.P.In Alzheimer's disease, brain, Dementia, Depression, Medicine, music, Neuropsychiatric DiseaseLeave a comment

by Tori Rodriguez, MA, LPC

As the search continues for effective drug treatments for dementia, patients and caregivers may find some measure of relief from a common, non-pharmaceutical source. Researchers have found that music-related memory appears to be exempt from the extent of memory impairment generally associated with dementia, and several studies report promising results for several different types of musical experiences across a variety of settings and formats.

“We can say that perception of music can be intact, even when explicit judgments and overt recognition have been lost,” Manuela Kerer, PhD, told Psychiatry Advisor. “We are convinced that there is a specialized memory system for music, which is distinct from other domains, like verbal or visual memory, and may be very resilient against Alzheimer’s disease.”

Kerer is a full-time musical composer with a doctoral degree in psychology who co-authored a study on the topic while working at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. She and her colleagues investigated explicit memory for music among ten patients with early-state Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and ten patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and compared their performance to that of 23 healthy participants. Not surprisingly, the patient group demonstrated worse performance on tasks involving verbal memory, but they did significantly better than controls on the music-perceptional tasks of detecting distorted tunes and judging timbre.

“The temporal brain structures necessary for verbal musical memory were mildly affected in our clinical patients, therefore attention might have shifted to the discrimination tasks which led to better results in this area,” she said. “Our results enhance the notion of an explicit memory for music that can be distinguished from other types of explicit memory — that means that memory for music could be spared in this patient group.”

Other findings suggest that music might even improve certain aspects of memory among people with dementia. In a randomized controlled trial published in last month in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, music coaching interventions improved multiple outcomes for both patients with dementia and their caregivers. The researchers divided 89 pairs of patients with dementia and their caregivers into three groups: two groups were assigned to caregiver-led interventions that involved either singing or listening to music, while a third group received standard care. Before and after the 10-week intervention, and six months after the intervention, participants were assessed on measures of mood, quality of life and neuropsychological functioning.

Results showed that the singing intervention improved working memory among patients with mild dementia and helped to preserve executive function and orientation among younger patients, and it also improved the well-being of caregivers. The listening intervention was found to have a positive impact on general cognition, working memory and quality of life, particularly among patients in institutional care with moderate dementia not caused by AD. Both interventions led to reductions in depression.

The findings suggest that “music has the power to improve mood and stimulate cognitive functions in dementia, most likely by engaging limbic and medial prefrontal brain regions, which are often preserved in the early stages of the illness,” study co-author Teppo Särkämö, PhD, a researcher at the University of Helsinki, Finland, told Psychiatry Advisor. “The results indicate that when used regularly, caregiver-implemented musical activities can be an important and easily applicable way to maintain the emotional and cognitive well-being of persons with dementia and also to reduce the psychological burden of family caregivers.”

Singing has also been shown to increase learning and retention of new verbal material in patients with AD, according to research published this year in the Journal of Clinical & Experimental Neuropsychology, and findings published in 2013 show that listening to familiar music improves the verbal narration of autobiographical memories in such patients. Another study found that a music intervention delivered in a group format reduced depression and delayed the deterioration of cognitive functions, especially short-term recall, in patients with mild and moderate dementia. Group-based music therapy appears to also decrease agitation among patients in all stages of dementia, as described in a systematic review published in 2014 in Nursing Times.

n addition to the effects of singing and listening to music on patients who already have dementia, playing a musical instrument may also offer some protection against the condition, according to a population-based twin study reported in 2014 in the International Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease. Researchers at the University of Southern California found that older adults who played an instrument were 64% less likely than their non-musician twin to develop dementia or cognitive impairment.

“Playing an instrument is a unique activity in that it requires a wide array of brain regions and cognitive functions to work together simultaneously, throughout both the right and left hemispheres,” co-author Alison Balbag, PhD, told Psychiatry Advisor. While the study did not examine causal mechanisms, “playing an instrument may be a very effective and efficient way to engage the brain, possibly granting older musicians better maintained cognitive reserve and possibly providing compensatory abilities to mitigate age-related cognitive declines.”

She notes that clinicians might consider suggesting that patients incorporate music-making into their lives as a preventive activity, or encouraging them to keep it up if they already play an instrument.
Further research, particularly neuroimaging studies, is needed to elucidate the mechanisms behind the effects of music on dementia, but in the meantime it could be a helpful supplement to patients’ treatment plans. “Music has considerable potential and it should be introduced much more in rehabilitation and neuropsychological assessment,” Kerer said.

http://www.psychiatryadvisor.com/alzheimers-disease-and-dementia/neurocognitive-neurodegenerative-memory-musical-alzheimers/article/452120/3/

References

Kerer M, Marksteiner J, Hinterhuber H, et al. Explicit (semantic) memory for music in patients with mild cognitive impairment and early-stage Alzheimer’s disease. Experimental Aging Research; 2013; 39(5):536-64.

Särkämö T, Laitinen S, Numminen A, et al. Clinical and Demographic Factors Associated with the Cognitive and Emotional Efficacy of Regular Musical Activities in Dementia. Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease; 2015; published online ahead of print.

Palisson J, Roussel-Baclet C, Maillet D, et al. Music enhances verbal episodic memory in Alzheimer’s disease. Journal of Clinical & Experimental Neuropsychology; 2015; 37(5):503-17.

El Haj M, Sylvain Clément, Luciano Fasotti, Philippe Allain. Effects of music on autobiographical verbal narration in Alzheimer’s disease. Journal of Neurolinguistics; 2013; 26(6): 691–700.

Chu H, Yang CY, Lin Y, et al. The impact of group music therapy on depression and cognition in elderly persons with dementia: a randomized controlled study. Biological Research for Nursing; 2014; 16(2):209-17.

Craig J. Music therapy to reduce agitation in dementia. Nursing Times; 2014; 110(32-33):12-5.
Balbag MA, Pedersen NL, Gatz M. Playing a Musical Instrument as a Protective Factor against Dementia and Cognitive Impairment: A Population-Based Twin Study. International Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease; 2014; 2014: 836748.