Until then, researchers believed that Alzheimer’s disease could be spotted early two years before the appearance of the first symptoms and believed that the biological processes that cause mental decline began about ten years before the first signs of this decline. However, a new study published in the journal Neurology indicates that the disease could actually start about 20 years before the onset of its first signs.
For 18 years, Prof. Rajan Kumar, associate of internal medicine at Rush University in Chicago (United States), and his colleagues have followed 2,125 people with an average age of 73 and who were not in pain. of dementia. Every three years, these volunteers took cognitive skills tests, and researchers compared the results over the years. They then realized that the people who had developed the Alzheimer’s disease had shown lower scores on their tests throughout the study period. In fact, their scores declined steadily, every 3 years, with each test.
According to Professor Kumar, the results of this study set the stage for the development of more targeted cognitive tests that can be given to middle-aged people to regularly assess their risk of developing some form of dementia. “In this way, patients have a longer period to prepare and possibly intervene to slow down the process of the disease.”
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