Researchers at the UT Dallas Center for Brain Health have developed a test that may help detect patients at high risk for Alzheimer’s disease. The study, published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, found that patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) had twice the risk of progressing to Alzheimer’s disease compared to their peers by identifying specific variants in brain waves. This test measures neural responses when subjects use semantic memory – long-range memory capable of representing general knowledge and concepts – applying EEG techniques (a cheaper, non-invasive option than other methods). The findings reveal a late onset of neural activity that correlates directly with the severity of cognitive dysfunction during word tasks and may indicate early progression to Alzheimer’s disease. “This is a good start to look at a group of MCI patients. The long-term goal is whether this test can be applied to individual patients in the future,” said the study’s principal investigator, John Hart Jr. PhD, medical director of the Center for Brain Health. Impaired episodic memory, the ability to retain new memories such as recent conversations, times or upcoming appointments, is the hallmark symptom of Alzheimer’s disease. Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a specific type of impairment between normal aging and Alzheimer’s disease characterized by deficits in episodic memory. In the study, aMCI patients were slower and less accurate than other subjects in a semantic memory task. eeg results showed a delayed brain activity during the task. In the situational memory assessment, the researchers found that the worse the patient’s performance, the more pronounced the late-onset brain activity. In this study, 16 patients with aMCI and 17 age-matched healthy controls underwent EEG monitoring and narrated pairs of words describing a material characteristic or randomly paired words, such as “hump” and “desert,” that elicited The word “camel” was remembered, but “hump” and “monitor” were treated as a random pairing. Subjects were then asked to indicate whether a particular object was evoked. “Most EEG studies of aMCI patients focus on observing resting states, but we are looking at the brain’s memory retrieval process. We think this may be more sensitive and specific than other EEG methods for pointing out a certain cognitive function deficit, such as semantic memory in this study, because EEG responds directly to neural activity,” said Hsueh-Sheng Chiang, PhD, lead author of the study and UT Southwestern Medical Center. “This test may provide additional information for the diagnosis of pre-dementia stages including MCI and clarification of neurological changes in Alzheimer’s disease,” he said. chiang and Hart will continue to develop this promising diagnostic tool.