Autobiographical Memory Tested for Early Alzheimer's Detection

A study published in the Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society details an "autobiographical memory" test administered to 35 healthy adults, about half of whom carry the gene variant APOE e4 that significantly raises the odds of developing Alzheimer's disease, reports ScienceDaily . "The hope is that in the near future we will have drugs and other treatments that could potentially slow down, stop, and even reverse some of these brain changes that we think are the hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease," says University of Arizona Professor Matthew Grilli. "The problem is that if we can't detect who has these hallmarks early enough, these treatments may not be fully effective, if at all." Participants were asked to recall recent memories, childhood memories, and early adulthood memories. Participants with the genetic risk factor for Alzheimer's, as a group, described memories with much less detail than those without it. "From this study, we can't identify one person and say for sure this person is in the preclinical phase of Alzheimer's disease," Grilli says. "That's the next stage of work that we need to do. But we know that as a group there probably are more people in the e4 carrier group that are in the preclinical phase of Alzheimer's disease, and we think this is why they had a harder time generating these memories."