Until then, researchers thought 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 started about ten years before the first signs of this decline. However, a new study published in the journal Neurology indicates that the disease could really begin about twenty years before the appearance of its first signs.
For 18 years, Pr Rajan Kumar, Associate of Internal Medicine at Rush University in Chicago (United States), and his colleagues have followed 2125 people aged 73 on average and who did not suffer from dementia. Every three years, these volunteers took cognitive skills tests, and the 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 steadily declined, every 3 years, on every test.
According to Professor Kumar, the results of this study pave the way for the development of more targeted cognitive tests that could be given to middle-aged people to regularly assess their risk of developing a form of dementia. “This way, patients have a longer period to prepare and possibly intervene to slow down the disease process.”
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