New clue to dementia

Having words on the tip of your tongue all the time can be a sign of deterioration, but it is not the most important one.

Preventing Alzheimer’s and other similar neurodegenerative diseases is one of medical science’s great obsessions. No wonder: the disease tends to appear long before it makes any noticeable difference in our behavior and cognitive abilities.

New key in speech. Now we have a new clue in this direction. A group of researchers has noticed that the speed with which we express our thoughts verbally may be an early marker of the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.

On the tip of the tongue. We say that we are in a lethal situation when a word is on the tip of our tongue, when we want to express something but cannot remember the specific term we want to use. We know that speech is related to Alzheimer’s disease because it is one of the areas affected by its development.

But until now, the increase in these fatalities has been the best indicator we have as a preliminary indicator of disease symptoms. New research suggests that it may not be the only one, or the most effective.

Using AI. The study was conducted using artificial intelligence (AI) as a resource. The experiment involved 125 participants, healthy adults aged 18 to 90 years. They were asked to verbally describe a scene in detail.

These recordings were then analysed using artificial intelligence. They were asked to identify patterns in speech, such as the speed of speech, the length of the gaps between words and the variety of vocabulary used.

Word-formation interference. The team gave the participants a series of standard tests to better understand cognitive processes and their relationship with language and to complement the previous test. They also introduced a test they called the “word-picture interaction task.”

Participants had to name the object they were shown while listening to another word, which made the process more difficult. For example, during observation they heard the word “mop” and were asked to name a broom.

So the team found that it wasn’t so much the pauses in their speech, but the speed at which they spoke (excluding those pauses) that best correlated with good brain health, the team behind the study explained. The study, published earlier this year in the journal Aging neuropsychology and cognition.

Turn. More recently, two dementia experts from the University of Sussex, Claire Lancaster and Alice Stanton, reinterpreted some of the study’s key findings in a journal article. TalkIn it, they propose alternative measures for analyzing the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon.

Measures such as verbal fluency tasks, such as those that ask participants to list words in a category (e.g., “animals” or “words that start with the letter “J”), would be more similar to the mental processes we use every day to select words.

They also explained that these “objective” measures should be combined with “subjective” measures, such as participants’ perceived difficulty in finding appropriate words.

There is much to learn. This is not the only factor to consider when interpreting the work. The study was conducted on many people of different ages, but at a specific point in time. Knowing how people’s cognitive abilities develop over time will require very long-term follow-up, which will also allow us to know whether some participants develop the disease and to what extent this correlates with other indicators.

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Image | JD Mason / Gul Işık