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Sea Hero Quest is a video game developed in partnership with Deutsche Telekom in Germany, the Glitchers gaming studio and several European universities. It is designed to identify people who may have early, mild symptoms of dementia that are not detected by medical tests.
When most people think of Alzheimer's disease, they think of a disease that ruins a person's memory. Although memory problems are very common and serious with Alzheimer's disease, these are late symptoms. Researchers and doctors want to catch the disease as early as possible before memory loss occurs, giving future treatments the best chance of success.
Sea Hero Quest was designed to identify people who may be at risk for Alzheimer's disease but who are not yet suffering from major symptoms of the disease. According to a study recently published in the journal PNAS, the game seems to be effective.
In Sea Hero Quest, which is a virtual reality game, players must navigate and control a virtual boat. They receive a card and checkpoints, then the card is removed and players must access these checkpoints in the game world without the card.
According to the researchers, every two minutes spent playing the game equates to five hours of laboratory research. Because Sea Hero Quest has been released for a few years and has been downloaded and used by more than three million players. They collected the equivalent of 1,700 years of research data on Alzheimer's disease.
The researchers involved in the project studied people with the APOE4 gene, who are thought to increase the risk of developing dementia in this person while they gambled. They then compared the results of these individuals to those of those who played the game and do not have this gene.
"We found that people at high genetic risk, APOE4 carriers, performed poorly in space navigation tasks. They have taken less effective routes to reach the checkpoint targets, "said team member Professor Michael Hornberger.
Using data collected from thousands of players who downloaded and played Sea Hero Quest, the researchers were able to create a baseline to which their test results could be compared. The team hopes that in the future, this data and the game will help identify people who need treatment for dementia before they begin to suffer from some of the most serious symptoms of their later stage.
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