Catching signs of dementia before serious symptoms emerge could help with better treatments

Learning your odds of eventually developing dementia — a pressing concern for many, especially those with a family history of it — requires medical testing and counseling. But what if everyday behavior, like overlooking a couple of credit card payments or habitually braking while driving, could foretell your risk?

A spate of experiments is underway to explore that possibility, reflecting the growing awareness that the pathologies underlying dementia can begin years or even decades before symptoms emerge.

“Early detection is key for intervention, at the stage when that would be most effective,” said Sayeh Bayat, lead author of a driving study funded by the National Institutes of Health and conducted at Washington University in St. Louis.

Such efforts could help identify potential volunteers for clinical trials, researchers say, and help protect older people against financial abuse and other dangers.

In recent years many once- promising dementia drugs, particularly for Alzheimer’s disease, have failed in trials. One possible reason, researchers say, is that the drugs are administered too late to be helpful. Identifying risks earlier, when the brain has suffered less damage, could create a pool of potential participants with “preclinical” Alzheimer’s disease, who could then test preventive measures or treatments.

It could also bring improvements in daily life. “We could support people’s ability to drive longer, and have safer streets for everyone,” Bayat offered as an example.

For now the search for older people who are likely to develop Alzheimer’s or other dementias takes place mostly in research settings, where patients learn their risk status through some combination of genetic testing, spinal taps or PET scans to detect amyloid in the brain, as well as through questions about family history.

“It’s all about finding people soon enough to intervene and prevent or delay the onset of the disease,” said Emily Lar­gent, a medical ethicist and health policy researcher at the Penn Memory Center in Philadelphia, which undertakes many such studies.

Other kinds of predictive tests are on the horizon, including over-the-counter blood tests for tau, another Alzheimer’s biomarker, but are several years away, Largent said.

That leaves methods that are invasive, like spinal taps, or expensive, like PET scans. These approaches can’t be used to screen large groups of people. “They’re not available everywhere,” Bayat said. “They’re not very accessible or scalable.”

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

The Washington University study enrolled 64 older adults with preclinical Alzheimer’s, as determined by spinal taps (the results were not shared with participants), and 75 who were deemed cognitively normal.

For a year, researchers measured both groups’ driving performance — how often they accelerated or braked aggressively, exceeded or fell well below the speed limit, made abrupt moves — and their “driving space” (number of trips, average distance, unique destinations, trips at night). “Only now, because we have these technologies, can we do this kind of research,” Bayat said.

The study found that driving behavior and age could predict preclinical Alzheimer’s 88% of the time. Those findings could spur recruitment for clinical trials and allow interventions — like an alert when a car drifts — to help keep drivers on the road. In areas with inadequate public transportation (which is most areas), that could enhance seniors’ independence.

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

Similarly, a study analyzing medical records and consumer credit reports for more than 80,000 Medicare beneficiaries showed that seniors who eventually received a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease were significantly more likely to have delinquent credit card payments than those who were demographically similar but never received such diagnoses. They also were more likely to have subprime credit scores.

“We were motivated by anecdotes in which family members discover a relative’s dementia through a catastrophic financial event, like a home being seized,” said Lauren Nicholas, the lead author and a health economist at the University of Colorado School of Public Health. “This could be a way to identify patients at risk.”

The problems appeared early, with at least two consecutive payments skipped as much as six years before a diagnosis, and subprime credit 2-1/2 years before. Although smaller studies have pointed to an association between self-reported financial mismanagement and dementia, this is the largest and the first to use actual financial data, Nicholas added.

In Japan, researchers have developed a machine-learning tool that scrutinizes phone conversations for signs of preclinical Alzheimer’s. Using audio files recorded during interviews last year, they compared healthy patients’ vocal features — pitch, intensity, silent intervals — with those with Alzheimer’s and found that the models could predict cognitive status.

IBM researchers have picked up elevated risk in writing tests, finding that word patterns and usage predicted later Alzheimer’s diagnoses. Any of these findings might one day be used for early screening.

Such approaches raise concerns about privacy, however. “Are people comfortable with a bank or an auto insurance company having and communicating that information?” Largent asked. “It becomes medical information in the hands of people who are not physicians.”

At the Penn Memory Center, where information is indeed in health professionals’ hands, “some people who are cognitively unimpaired, after testing in the clinic, indicate they’d like to be monitored,” she said. “Others find that unbelievably intrusive.”

Bioethicists have grappled for years with questions about informing patients of higher-­than-normal risk for a feared disease for which there is, still, no effective treatment. Studies have shown that in research settings, results can be communicated safely and effectively. But fears of discrimination and stigma remain.

In a number of studies, Largent has examined what happens when dementia risks are disclosed to patients and families. She has found that about one-third of patients respond to the information by changing their health behavior, undertaking legal and financial planning or taking other preparatory steps. “They do things like update their wills, draft advance directives, exercise more, maybe move closer to an adult child,” she said.