The promise of a video game of detection of Alzheimer's disease: TECH & INNOVATION: Science Times

When most people think of Alzheimer's disease, they think of a disease that impairs a person's memory. However, although memory problems are very common and severe with Alzheimer's disease, these are advanced 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 is a video game developed in partnership with the German group Deutsche Telekom, the Glitchers gaming studio and several European universities. It is designed to identify people who may have early and mild symptoms of dementia that medical tests do not allow. detect. Sea Hero Quest has been designed to identify people at risk of suffering from Alzheimer's disease but who are not yet suffering from major symptoms of the disease. According to one study, 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. Sea Hero Quest being released for a few years and downloaded and played by more than three million players, they have 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, which was supposed to increase the risk of developing dementia in this person who plays the game. They then compared the results of these people with those of the players who did not. not this gene. "We found that carriers with high genetic risk, APOE4 carriers, performed poorly in space navigation tasks, using less efficient routes to achieve control objectives," said Professor Michael Hornberger, Member of the team.

Using data collected from thousands of players who downloaded and played Sea Hero Quest, the researchers were able to create a baseline against 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.