Have you lost your way? Don’t you remember where you are? Losing track of the way, may be a early indication of the “forgetfulness disease” Alzheimer’s !
A new study has stated that if you are forgetting your way around, it may be an earl
y symptom of Alzheimer’s disease. People generally mentally prepare cognitive maps of new areas they visit but what happens if they are unable to prepare these maps in their minds? They get lost!
If a person faces increasing problems in making proper “cognitive maps of new surroundings”, much before clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer’s is carried out; it may be a signal of the eventual clinical onset of the dreaded forgetfulness disorder, states the Washington study.
According to Denise Head, the senior author of the study, the navigational tasks that are prepared to evaluate cognitive mapping may be able to “represent a powerful new tool for detecting the very earliest Alzheimer’s disease-related changes in cognition.”To detect preclinical Alzheimer’s researchers generally resort to the standard psychometric task of episodic memory but this study claims that the detection of preclinical Alzheimer’s was better with the help of the spatial navigation task designed especially for the assessment of the cognitive map skills, in this case.
Samantha Allison , a psychology doctorate student and the first author of the study, conducted at Washington University in St. Louis, stated her viewpoint saying “Our observations suggest a progression such that preclinical Alzheimer’s disease is characterized by hippocampal atrophy and associated cognitive mapping difficulties, particularly during the learning phase. As the disease progresses, cognitive mapping deficits worsen, the caudate becomes involved, and route learning deficits emerge.”
The study was based on findings gathered from patients who had been diagnosed with preclinical Alzheimer’s. Scientists tested a group of patients who were made to navigate a maze on the computer and these people faced a lot of difficulty in the task. Details of the study are included in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.
