How fast elderly people walk may be related to the amount of amyloid they have built up in their brains, even if they don’t yet have symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, according to a study published in the December 2, 2015, online issue of the journal Neurology.
The study involved 128 people with an average age of 76 years who did not have dementia but were considered at high risk for developing it because they had some concerns about their memory. The participants had positron emission tomography (PET) scans of their brains to measure amyloid plaques in the brain. Of the participants, 48% had a level of amyloid often associated with dementia.
Participants were also tested on thinking and memory skills and how well they could complete everyday activities. A total of 46% of the participants had mild cognitive impairment (MCI).
The results were quite interesting. I want to know who have thoughts on this.
Dear Ricardo,
it is a very interesting question for me as I am studying motoneuron disease and motoneuron degeneration. There is a form of dementia called "Frontotemporal dementia or FTD" that is associated with both memory loss (dementia) and motoneuron disease (MND) i.e., loss of motor function. Interestingly, in motoneuron disease patients and in elderly, as well as in animal models, motoneuron degeneration is selective and first motoneurons to die are the fast alpha motoneurons forming fast-twitch type motor units (for details see my 2015 Neural plasticity review available at RG). It will be interesting to find out whether this symptom of loosing simple skills, such as fast walking or left-right motor coordination, may be useful in prediction of future dementia and the general correlation between the two? Fortunately increasing numbers of dementia and MND neuroscientists have started paying attention to each others work.
best wishes,
Refik
Gait speed alone is not an adequate predictor. There is quite some literature on dual tasks, i.e. combining walking tasks with mild cognitive challenge, e.g. subtracting numbers etc. Take the trouble and look up papers by authors like Reto Kressig and Stephanie Bridenbaugh.
You may also want to read Joe Verghese's work:
1) Motoric cognitive risk syndrome: multicountry prevalence and dementia risk. Neurology. 2014 Aug 19;83(8):718-26.
2) Motoric cognitive risk syndrome: Multicenter incidence study. Neurology. 2014 Dec 9;83(24):2278-84.
Kindly, Paul
Dear Ricardo : is walking speed is the only gait component of this study. What about other gait elements ? How were the participants selected and what were the details of the test itself ? It will be very interesting to read this study,.Has it already been published ?
There are very interesting questions here. Refik Kanjhan, your work is on the iceberg and could be very useful mainly helping colleagues in the primary health line. Good work!
Arthur, this is not my study, but I believe the authors also used a combination of variables for describing decline or impairment in walking speed to better validate this data, e.g., relating to cognitive function, establishing a broad age bracket in order to gather not only information about gait impairment (e.g., slowness, postural instability, frequent falls) but also the relationship with physiological variants, and the impact of all of them in the real life. Paper was published in the American Academy of Neurology, but I did not get the full text. Try this link:
http://dgnews.docguide.com/can-slow-walking-speed-elderly-signal-alzheimer-s-disease-hallmarks?overlay=2&nl_ref=newsletter&pk_campaign=newsletter
and let me know if you have another thoughts on this?
Thanks Ricardo,
Original paper has just came out in Neurology.
Neurology. 2015 Dec 7. pii: 10.1212/WNL.0000000000002235. [Epub ahead of print]
Relationship of regional brain β-amyloid to gait speed.
By Del Campo N et al.
best wishes,
Refik
I studied The link between gait And cognition for a couple of years. And i Found some interesting data that could lead to use to do an ealry diagnosis of AD and to differentiate ad and ftd in a early moment. if you need email me at [email protected]
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