the new (and great) hope in the fight against the disease

A test from Ace Alzheimer Center Barcelona shows that the sound when speaking indicates the risk of dementia in people with mild cognitive impairment

He spontaneous speech of a person can indicate whether they have more or less possibilities of developing Alzheimer’s. This is what the first results, hopeful, from an investigation of Ace Alzheimer Center Barcelona, published in the magazine ‘Frontiers in Dementia’, that relates the common language with the accumulation of amyloid beta in the brain, a factor that is considered a precursor to Alzheimer’s. This essay does not investigate the lexicon or the syntactic construction of the patients, but rather something much more unusual: the noise, understood as such sound waves that people emit when communicating.

Alzheimer’s patients, this essay maintains, present very subtle changes in this noise. So subtle that they escape the human ear and can only be identified by artificial intelligence (AI). One of the researchers’ objectives is to design non-invasive diagnostic tests, like this one of Alzheimer’s, the most common dementia that affects some 50 million people in the world. For 2050, It is expected that there will be some 132 million sick. This September 21st is celebrated World Alzheimer’s Day. In Spain, there are about 800,000 sick, according to the Ministry of Health. in a society increasingly older the key goes through detect as early as possible This disease, which is usually diagnosed in late stages.

A federated network

The Ace Alzheimer Center Barcelona study has been carried out within the framework of the Tartaglia project, that seeks to create a federated network to share biomedical data between different institutions and speed up the application of AI in the National Health System. Tartaglia, funded by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation, has several working groups dedicated to different pathologies, As the prostate cancer, the macular degeneration or the Alzheimer’s, among other.

“The objective is to identify the initial stages of Alzheimer’s. We analyze the spontaneous speech, although we limit the universe of the conversation. For example, we show a picture of a stock and have the person talk about it. AND we record the audio”, Explain Sergi Valero, deputy director of Research at Ace Alzheimer Center Barcelona and responsible From this project.

Next, this audio is computationally processed. “From this audio, we we focus on the noise, What are they sound waves that can be dissected in many parameters. We do not enter the lexicon, nor the syntactic structure that the person uses, but we remain solely and exclusively in the noise. And we have seen that this can tell us about Alzheimer’s”, says Valero.

Once the waves are converted into “sound parameters” through ‘software’, researchers are in charge of differentiate which (of these parameters) are those that determine whether a patient has the disease or not. “Once they are determined, the AI ​​differentiates between “Who has the disease and who doesn’t,” Valero says. Thus, at this point, the AI ​​identifies those “subtle changes” in the person’s speech that could not be captured by the human ear. And the Ace Alzheimer Center Barcelona trial has found notable differences in speech among patients who had positive amyloid in the cerebrospinal fluid (the one that surrounds the brain, runs through the spinal cord and can be removed through a lumbar puncture) and those that do not.

This diagnostic test, which has yet to be developed, would be useful for detect Alzheimer’s early in people not yet diagnosed, but who do have a “mild cognitive impairment” even though they lead a normal life. “Mild cognitive impairment is a prelude to illness, the phase before dementia,” says this researcher. With this, they are four studies carried out around the world that manage to relate the load of the amyloid beta protein in cerebrospinal fluid with parameters spontaneous language.

Pre-dementia phase

In these Ace Alzheimer Center Barcelona tests, people have participated 52 patients diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment. Everyone has been asked to describe, spontaneously, an image. The test involved less than a minute of evaluation. Of the total number of participants, 65% were women and the 35% men. The average age was 73 years old, and the educational level, half. Of the total sample, 33 participants had a positive cerebrospinal fluid amyloid test result and the other half did not, even though they all had the same diagnosis.

Valero is hopeful that this test will end up serving to detect the early Alzheimer’s in healthy people. “The average age [de detección] are the 72 years old, but there is more and more research from 50 onwards. We study younger and younger people because we know that these changes [como la concentración de la proteína beta amiloide] are produced years before the first symptoms,” Explain.

He aim It is to anticipate as much as possible a disease (the second most worrying Spaniards, behind cancer) for which, at the moment, there is no cure, but whose deterioration can be slowed down. According to Valero, these results They also open the door to improving diagnostic tools with non-invasive tests.