Automated Phone Tasks can Predict Early Signs of Alzheimer's Disease

A brief, simulated task of navigating a phone menu can detect the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease through the earliest changes in daily functioning activities. The findings published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, could help inform prevention trials testing treatments for Alzheimers disease. This test is a more objective assessment of an aspect of daily functioning as opposed to our typical way of using a questionnaire filled out by somebody who knows the individual well (1^✔ ✔Trusted Source
Early risk assessment for Alzheimer's disease

Go to source). To conduct the study, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Brigham and Division of Geriatric Psychiatry at McLean Hospital, used the Harvard Automated Phone Task (APT).

This test includes three tasks an older person may encounter on a phone menu, including refilling a prescription, calling a health insurance company to select a new primary care physician, and handling a banking transaction.

What if Phone can Help Predict the Early Signs of Alzheimer’s Disease?

The test, which was developed and validated at the Center for Alzheimer Research and Treatment at Brigham and MGH, asks participants to navigate an interactive voice response system to complete these tasks.

The participants and their study partner, who is someone who knows them well, also completed other assessments about a variety of daily activities, followed by standard cognitive testing and brain scans that show amyloid and tau pathology in different regions of the brain.

Just under a third of the clinically normal participants (without cognitive impairment) showed evidence of elevated amyloid and tau in their brains and had trouble with the more challenging tasks of the daily functioning assessment (2^✔ ✔Trusted Source
Associations of the Harvard Automated Phone Task and Alzheimer’s Disease Pathology in Cognitively Normal Older Adults: Preliminary Findings

Go to source).

This is notable because most people with Alzheimer’s disease will start with short-term memory difficulties, word-finding difficulties, and issues with a sense of direction. They may also have decreased motivation, depression, irritability, and anxiety.

The assessment only represents a small part of daily functioning that not everyone utilizes. The study was also limited by a lack of diversity among the participants: 86 percent of the participants were white, and 97 percent were non-Hispanic.

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Future studies will be needed to determine if these findings may be replicated in more representative study populations and if, over a longer period, associations with difficulty completing the simpler tasks emerge.

Having a task like the Harvard APT could better capture an individual's overall ability to complete complex everyday tasks rather than the questionnaires that are given to patients and their informants to better understand the preclinical stages of Alzheimer's disease.

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References:

1. Early risk assessment for Alzheimer's disease - (https://alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1016/j.jalz.2009.01.019)
2. Associations of the Harvard Automated Phone Task and Alzheimer’s Disease Pathology in Cognitively Normal Older Adults: Preliminary Findings - (https://content.iospress.com/articles/journal-of-alzheimers-disease/jad220885)

Source-Eurekalert