A video game that works better at diagnosing Alzheimer's disease than all existing testing? Too good to be true?
We need to start with a quick summary of parts of my book, The Dementia Diet. I go through all our existing testing and point out that it really doesn't detect Alzheimer's disease. Seriously, I was surprised as well. Even though I know better, I'd like to believe billions spent on big machines would make us safe and wise. As soon as they come up with a diagnostic hand-held device like they had on Star Trek, I know I'll just want it to work. But the bottom line is that the existing tests don't really help us. The most high-tech method for detecting memory loss is having your doctor interview you.
So basically this video game might be better than nothing. Is it?
The article I read from CNN starts off well. They had 4.3 million users of this video game. That's a huge pool, and impossible to copy in any lab setting. So how did they tell if these people had Alzheimer's Disease? Well, they whittled down the pool to only those players between 50 and 75 (27,000), I guess by reported age? But we all know that kids and adults don't give their proper ages online, so it's unreliable to take that at face value.
Let's say they did have some kind of way of making sure those people were the right age. It doesn't matter because of the final step they took. In the lab, they had sixty people do the video game and then tested their blood for markers that might indicate Alzheimer's disease. What blood marker did they test for? The most common genetic marker for Alzheimer's disease (APOE4). Thirty people with the marker and thirty without the marker. Taken together, there was a difference in results between the two groups.
Ta dah! We can figure out if you have a genetic marker based on your video game score. The authors repeat the term "big data" many times in their abstract, as if the results of their small lab study should be interpreted for the 27,000 people who did the game online. Keep in mind that they don't even know if those online players were even the age they pretended to be.
If you're like me, and you drill down to the actual data, what you find is what you'd expect. Some people in the sixty-person lab test are really good at the video game, and some people are not. Whether or not they have the genetic marker, they are all over the map. When I did this kind of online video game trial myself and wrote about it in the Dementia Diet, the reality is that you're testing computer facility and mouse speed. Hopefully, it's obvious that moving your mouse faster doesn't mean your memory is better. I also wanted to be clear that the more I did the game, the better I got. So what you could easily be testing is how many video games a person plays, not anything to do with memory.
But the catch is that the marker the researchers used to test for Alzheimer's is largely disproven. APOE4 is a risk factor for more amyloid plaques in the brain. But amyloid plaques have almost no connection to memory loss (I know, I was surprised too. Read the Dementia Diet for more).
So we have a video game trial of sixty people that may have showed some connection between video game playing and a risk factor for Alzheimer's disease. But that risk factor is based on a now-defunct definition of what Alzheimer's disease is and how it works. We can conclude that people like playing free video games, that the media loves to make clickbait headlines, and that none of this has much to do with actually diagnosing memory loss.
We need to start with a quick summary of parts of my book, The Dementia Diet. I go through all our existing testing and point out that it really doesn't detect Alzheimer's disease. Seriously, I was surprised as well. Even though I know better, I'd like to believe billions spent on big machines would make us safe and wise. As soon as they come up with a diagnostic hand-held device like they had on Star Trek, I know I'll just want it to work. But the bottom line is that the existing tests don't really help us. The most high-tech method for detecting memory loss is having your doctor interview you.
So basically this video game might be better than nothing. Is it?
The article I read from CNN starts off well. They had 4.3 million users of this video game. That's a huge pool, and impossible to copy in any lab setting. So how did they tell if these people had Alzheimer's Disease? Well, they whittled down the pool to only those players between 50 and 75 (27,000), I guess by reported age? But we all know that kids and adults don't give their proper ages online, so it's unreliable to take that at face value.
Let's say they did have some kind of way of making sure those people were the right age. It doesn't matter because of the final step they took. In the lab, they had sixty people do the video game and then tested their blood for markers that might indicate Alzheimer's disease. What blood marker did they test for? The most common genetic marker for Alzheimer's disease (APOE4). Thirty people with the marker and thirty without the marker. Taken together, there was a difference in results between the two groups.
Ta dah! We can figure out if you have a genetic marker based on your video game score. The authors repeat the term "big data" many times in their abstract, as if the results of their small lab study should be interpreted for the 27,000 people who did the game online. Keep in mind that they don't even know if those online players were even the age they pretended to be.
If you're like me, and you drill down to the actual data, what you find is what you'd expect. Some people in the sixty-person lab test are really good at the video game, and some people are not. Whether or not they have the genetic marker, they are all over the map. When I did this kind of online video game trial myself and wrote about it in the Dementia Diet, the reality is that you're testing computer facility and mouse speed. Hopefully, it's obvious that moving your mouse faster doesn't mean your memory is better. I also wanted to be clear that the more I did the game, the better I got. So what you could easily be testing is how many video games a person plays, not anything to do with memory.
But the catch is that the marker the researchers used to test for Alzheimer's is largely disproven. APOE4 is a risk factor for more amyloid plaques in the brain. But amyloid plaques have almost no connection to memory loss (I know, I was surprised too. Read the Dementia Diet for more).
So we have a video game trial of sixty people that may have showed some connection between video game playing and a risk factor for Alzheimer's disease. But that risk factor is based on a now-defunct definition of what Alzheimer's disease is and how it works. We can conclude that people like playing free video games, that the media loves to make clickbait headlines, and that none of this has much to do with actually diagnosing memory loss.
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| https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/927867 |
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