Look for the first signs of dementia in driving and credit scores

This leaves invasive methods, like lumbar punctures, or expensive, like PET. These approaches cannot be used to filter large groups of people. “They are not available everywhere,” Ms. Bayat said. “They are not very accessible or scalable.

But a GPS device in someone’s car could monitor driving behavior almost continuously at low cost, providing digital biomarkers. “Studies have shown that driving changes in people with symptomatic Alzheimer’s disease,” Ms. Bayat said. “But some changes are happening even earlier.”

The University of Washington study recruited 64 elderly people with preclinical Alzheimer’s disease, as determined by lumbar punctures (the results were not shared with participants), and 75 who were considered cognitively normal.

For a year, the researchers measured the driving performance of the two groups – how often they accelerated or braked aggressively, passed or fell well below the speed limit, made sudden movements – and their “driving space”. »(Number of trips, average distance, single destinations, night trips). “It’s only now, because we have these technologies, that we can do this kind of research,” Ms. Bayat said.

The study found that driving behavior and age could predict preclinical Alzheimer’s disease 88% of the time. These findings could boost recruitment for clinical trials and enable interventions – like an alert when a car is drifting – to help keep drivers on the road. In areas where public transport is inadequate (which is the case in most areas), this could improve the autonomy of the elderly.

Dr. Jason Karlawich, geriatrician and co-director of the Penn Memory Center, called the study “provocative” and well-designed. “The results suggest that monitoring cognitively intense behavior in the real world can detect the first subtle signs of emerging cognitive impairment,” he said in an email.

Likewise, a study analyzing the medical records and consumer credit reports of more than 80,000 Medicare beneficiaries found that seniors who were ultimately diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease were much more likely to have Alzheimer’s disease. overdue credit card payments than those who were demographically similar but never received such diagnoses. They were also more likely to have risky credit scores.