07/09/05 Simple word tests could help detect onset of Alzheimer's
IAN JOHNSTON
REGULAR mental health check-ups using simple tests could be used in the future to spot the early warning signs of dementia and help doctors treat the disease more effectively, an expert in language said yesterday.
Professor Andy Ellis, a psychologist at York University, has been studying language problems in people with Alzheimer's disease and has come up with a test which could be used to detect the condition.
He found elderly people without Alzheimer's were able to list the names of about 20 to 25 different fruits or animals within a minute, while those with mild forms of the condition could only come up with about ten to 15.
Prof Ellis said this could be used as a first-step diagnostic test for use by doctors confronted by an elderly person worried they might be getting dementia, before sending them for an expensive brain scan.
In addition to the number of words people can remember, the kind of words is also significant. Words learned up to about the age of five tend to remain along with words in everyday use.
So people with Alzheimer's tend to remember the words for animals like cats and dogs, but forget words like zebra and giraffe, which tend to be learned at primary school.
Prof Ellis carried out a study on a group of 96 patients. The average age was 77 with a range from people in their mid-sixties to those in their mid-eighties. He said: "People in the early stages of Alzheimer's can think of fewer animal names, which is perhaps not surprising.
"They write down perhaps half as many as the healthy control group, but also there is a characteristic of the words they produce. What seems to be happening is their active vocabulary is shrinking and the loss of words is not random.
"They retain names they are reading and hearing with a higher frequency and they retain early learned words better than the words people learn in later childhood or adulthood."
Prof Ellis said he still had work to do to produce a working "prognostic guide" for use by doctors, but hoped this could be done over the next two years.
"At the moment, having a check-up every now and then to see how we are progressing physically is nothing unusual and perhaps in decades to come the notion of having an annual cognitive check-up might become more established," he said.
" This [his test] could be a way of screening out people who appear to be cognitively intact without needing an expensive further investigation."
Prof Ellis said his research team was also planning to look at other types of words such as names of cities and tools to expand the range of the test as some people might be particularly familiar with some subjects than others.
From (thescotsman.scotsman.com)