Electroencephalogram to diagnose Alzheimer's:

Alzheimer is a neurodegenerative disease, that is, caused by the progressive destruction of brain neurons. A disease that is the most common type of dementia and currently has about 30 million people around the planet. It is more; According to the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates, the global number of people affected would rise to 53 million in just over three decades.

However, despite countless researches, no effective treatment has yet been discovered once the symptoms of the disease have appeared. Hence the crucial importance of early diagnosis of Alzheimer, which would enable better care and treatment of those affected since the initial stages of pathology. And in this context, researchers at the University of Birmingham (UK) seem to have given one of the keys to identifying those with a high risk of developing it: the deterioration in the processing of written language – or what is the same, the Loss of ability to identify or understand written words.

One of the main features of Alzheimer's disease is the progressive deterioration of language. However, there are very few studies that have investigated the language processing capacity during the period between the onset of the initial symptoms of the disease and its complete development».

To carry out the study, the authors counted with the participation of 25 elderly people who underwent an electroencephalogram – EEG, a test that analyses the electrical activity of the brain by means of electrodes placed in the head – to measure the time It took them to process the words they saw on a computer screen. Specifically, the sample of participants in the study included completely healthy older people, older with mild cognitive impairment, and patients who had developed Alzheimer's disease after being diagnosed less than three years ago from mild cognitive impairment.

The objective was to detect the possible existence of abnormalities in brain activity during language processing in patients with mild cognitive impairment, anomalies that could offer us a vision of their probability of developing Alzheimer. The reason why we focus on language is that it is a crucial aspect of cognition that is particularly deteriorated during the progression of the disease. '
In this context, previous research conducted with EEG has shown that the time required for a person's brain to process a written word is set at around 250 milliseconds. And the participants in this new study, did they meet these 250 milliseconds? Not really.

The most important result of our study is that the brain response is anomalous, if not ' aberrant ', in individuals who will end up developing Alzheimer's disease in the future. A response that, on the other hand, remains ' intact ' in patients who remain stable '.
The findings were totally unexpected, because although the language is affected in the Alzheimer, it occurs in much more advanced phases of the disease.