Alzheimer's Patients More Likely to Develop Cognitive Fluctuations

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Alzheimer's Patients More Likely to Develop Cognitive Fluctuations

Seniors who are developing, or already suffer from, the dreaded Alzheimer's Disease (AD) are more likely than their peers to suffer disruptions in their train of thought. These events are also known as cognitive fluctuations, and they include such things as sleepiness, staring into nothing, and disorganized or illogical thinking. The conclusion belongs to a new study carried out by experts at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The team discovered that older people with symptoms of AD tended to exhibit more such episodes than their healthy peers.

“If you have these lapses, they don't by themselves mean that you have Alzheimer's. Such lapses do occur in healthy older adults. But our results suggest that they are something your doctor needs to consider if he or she is evaluating you for problems with thinking and memory,” WUSL neurologist James Galvin, MD, explains.

The expert is based at the Barnes-Jewish Hospital, and is also the senior author of a new paper detailing the findings, which appears in the January 19 issue of the respected scientific journal Neurology.

In previous studies, cognitive fluctuations have been associated with a condition known as dementia with Lewy bodies. However, until the new study came along, there was no clear indication of any possible links between Alzheimer's disease and these mental lapses. “We have some ideas about why the biology of dementia with Lewy bodies causes these mental lapses, but nothing comparable for Alzheimer's. It's possible that some of the patients who were diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in this study will go on to develop dementia with Lewy bodies, but at the time of the study, they weren't showing any of the Lewy body dementia's core features,” Galvin adds.

The new investigation was conducted on 511 participants. The study group had an average age of 78, and all of the subjects were determined to be experiencing memory problems. The WUSL specialists conducted a thorough survey of the symptoms each of the participants exhibited, by either consulting with the people directly, or by asking family members. The factors they were scanning for included drowsiness or lethargy in spite of sufficient sleep, the incidence of times when the test subjects were thinking in illogical and disorganized patterns, and how often the seniors stared into a single point for prolonged periods of time.

About 12 percent of all respondents were determined to exhibit all these three symptoms, the team reveals in the Neurology paper. The conclusions of the research also showed that people suffering from all three mental lapses were 4.6 times more likely than the others to eventually develop Alzheimer's disease. The work is very important because it also sheds more light on Lewy body dementia. It was shown that the condition could easily overlap with AD and Parkinson's, and the new approach to analyzing these correlations may result in novel therapy and drugs to fight dementia.