British scientists presenting at a science conference in Dublin suggested that a simple word test could be revealing for those in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. Their study also published in “Neuropsychologia” suggests that the victims of the progressive debilitating disorder would not be in a position to compete with healthy individuals in listing in one-minute the names of as many animals and fruits they knew.
University of York's Professor Andy Ellis and his colleagues studied the results of tests performed by 96 Alzheimer patients and 40 healthy individuals, both groups averaging 77 years in age to eliminate "senior moments" skewing the results. They noted that "just by looking at the characteristics of the words” it was possible to distinguish the healthy from Alzheimer victims, as the latter listed familiar words, learnt in early childhood, unlike the former who also included those learnt in late childhood. Professor Ellis observed that offering considerable value was the possibility of identifying people with the first signs of something “going wrong", by exploring the “characteristics of the words that are still available to them”.
Alzheimer's known to be the leading cause of age onset dementia has a worldwide base of 12 million victims, which is rising as the population ages. With no known cure, the illness causes loss off memory and mental ability that drug treatments may at best slow down in progress. The healthy elderly included zebras, giraffes and badgers that almost never figured in the Alzheimer victims' lists, which the Professor suggested were learnt “more at around the age of 6-10 rather than 1-5" and less familiar than cats or dogs. While those with healthy memory systems could recall an average 33 words per minute, those with early Alzheimer's could barely average half that number. The novelty about the method is that unlike usual tests, a different part of the brain is involved.
Professor Ellis and his team now are keen to evaluate the possibility of making a prognostic guide as the simple tests could help doctors in facilitating early treatment and therefore delayed debilitation, besides offering clues to the way the disease progresses. Only last year researcher Peter Garrard, published a study analyzing the novelist Iris Murdoch's works, comparing "Jackson's Dilemma", her last novel written in her early stages of Alzheimer's as against the earlier written "The Sea, The Sea" and her first novel "Under the Net". He concluded that her last work lacked the rich vocabulary of her earlier works and observed that “a smaller pool of words” may have preceded sentence construction problems.
Dr. Gary Small, a UCLA professor in the Neurosciences was wary that given the natural variations in language abilities, pen/paper tests maybe inadequate as assessment tools. There was a possibility that college-educated older people could get a normal score and yet be a victim of Alzheimer's while those with no college studies could have below normal scores and yet be free of the disease. But should all the educational pre-conditions match there is a possibility of a one minute word test leading to an awareness of the onset of Alzheimer's disease. Next time, a name, place, animal, things game may become a norm in medical testing for the aged.
