Alzheimer Disease, Healthy Aging, Mild Cognitive Impairment
Conditions
Brief summary
Alzheimer's disease dementia (AD) is a debilitating and prevalent neurodegenerative disease in older adults globally. Cognitive impairment, a hallmark of AD, is assessed through verbal tests that require high specialization, and while accepted as screening tools for AD, general practitioners seldom use them. AD can be diagnosed with expensive, invasive neuroimaging and blood tests, but these are usually conducted when cognitive functioning is already severely impaired. Thus, finding a novel, non-invasive tool to detect and differentiate mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and AD is a prime public health interest. Self-figure drawings (a projective tool in which individuals are asked to draw a picture of themselves), are easy to administer and have been shown to differentiate between healthy and cognitively impaired individuals, including AD. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) (a type of deep neural network, applied to analyze visual imagery) has advanced to assess health conditions using art products. Therefore, the proposed study suggests utilizing CNN-based methods to develop and test an application tailored to differentiate between drawings of individuals with MCI, AD, and healthy controls (HC) using 4,000 self-figure drawings. This
Interventions
None listed
Sponsors
University of Haifa
Technion, Israel Institute of Technology
Study design
Observational model
COHORT
Time perspective
CROSS_SECTIONAL
Eligibility
Sex/Gender
ALL
Age
60 Years to No maximum
Healthy volunteers
Yes
Inclusion criteria
* Adults aged 60 and above with subtle signs of risk of future cognitive decline, residing in the community or in nursing homes with a minimum of 10 years of education.
Exclusion criteria
* Current or past psychiatric illness, the presence of congenital/organic cognitive condition, severe visual or motor impairment, and terminal illness (to avoid the effect of comorbidities).
Design outcomes
Primary
| Measure | Time frame | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Cognition | One day | The Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) is a 10-minute paper-based test that aims to detect MCI in older patients with symptomatology, suggesting impaired cognition. The MoCA is composed of 12 tasks to detect short-term memory, visuospatial ability, executive functioning, phonemic fluency, abstraction, attention, concentration, working memory, language, and orientation. |
| Cognition for adults diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease | One day | The Self-reported Cognitive Difficulties (CDS)75 is a 39-item questionnaire that requires participants or their caregivers in case of AD to rate how often they currently experience cognitive difficulties in everyday life using a 5-point scale (0 -"never" to 4 -"very often"). |
| Self-figure drawing -Cognition | One day | Self-figure drawing. Participants will be asked to draw themselves using a pencil on an A4-sized sheet of paper. |
Countries
Israel
Contacts
PRINCIPAL_INVESTIGATORJohanna Czamanski-Cohen, PhD
University of Haifa
Outcome results
None listed