Background: Although digital technology represents a growing field aiming to revolutionize early Alzheimer disease risk prediction and monitoring, the perspectives of older adults on an integrated digital brain health platform have not been investigated.
Objective: This study aims to understand the perspectives of older adults on a digital brain health platform by conducting semistructured interviews and analyzing their transcriptions by natural language processing.
Methods: The study included 28 participants from the Boston University Alzheimer's Disease Research Center, all of whom engaged with a digital brain health platform over an initial assessment period of 14 days.
Background: Physical activity has emerged as a modifiable behavioral factor to improve cognitive function. However, research on adherence to remote monitoring of physical activity in older adults is limited.
Objective: This study aimed to assess adherence to remote monitoring of physical activity in older adults within a pilot cohort from objective user data, providing insights for the scalability of such monitoring approaches in larger, more comprehensive future studies.
Background: With the aging global population and the rising burden of Alzheimer disease and related dementias (ADRDs), there is a growing focus on identifying mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to enable timely interventions that could potentially slow down the onset of clinical dementia. The production of speech by an individual is a cognitively complex task that engages various cognitive domains. The ease of audio data collection highlights the potential cost-effectiveness and noninvasive nature of using human speech as a tool for cognitive assessment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Although the growth of digital tools for cognitive health assessment, there's a lack of known reference values and clinical implications for these digital methods. This study aims to establish reference values for digital neuropsychological measures obtained through the smartphone-based cognitive assessment application, Defense Automated Neurocognitive Assessment (DANA), and to identify clinical risk factors associated with these measures.
Methods: The sample included 932 cognitively intact participants from the Framingham Heart Study, who completed at least one DANA task.
Background: Smartphone-based cognitive assessments have emerged as promising tools, bridging gaps in accessibility and reducing bias in Alzheimer disease and related dementia research. However, their congruence with traditional neuropsychological tests and usefulness in diverse cohorts remain underexplored.
Methods And Results: A total of 406 FHS (Framingham Heart Study) and 59 BHS (Bogalusa Heart Study) participants with traditional neuropsychological tests and digital assessments using the Defense Automated Neurocognitive Assessment (DANA) smartphone protocol were included.
Most research using digital technologies builds on existing methods for staff-administered evaluation, requiring a large investment of time, effort, and resources. Widespread use of personal mobile devices provides opportunities for continuous health monitoring without active participant engagement. Home-based sensors show promise in evaluating behavioral features in near real time.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Prior to a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease, many individuals experience cognitive and behavioral fluctuations that are not detected during a single session of traditional neuropsychological assessment. Mobile applications now enable high-frequency cognitive data to be collected remotely, introducing new opportunities and challenges. Emerging evidence suggests cognitively impaired older adults are capable of completing mobile assessments frequently, but no study has observed whether completion rates vary by assessment frequency or adherence type.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD) often present with coexisting vascular pathology that is expressed to different degrees and can lead to clinical heterogeneity.
Objective: To examine the utility of unsupervised statistical clustering approaches in identifying neuropsychological (NP) test performance subtypes that closely correlate with carotid intima-media thickness (cIMT) in midlife.
Methods: A hierarchical agglomerative and k-means clustering analysis based on NP scores (standardized for age, sex, and race) was conducted among 1,203 participants (age 48±5.
Introduction: We examined for associations between potentially modifiable risk factors across the adult life course and incident dementia.
Methods: Participants from the Framingham Heart Study were included (n = 4015). Potential modifiable risk factors included education, alcohol intake, smoking, body mass index (BMI), physical activity, social network, diabetes, and hypertension.
Introduction: Advances in digital technologies for health research enable opportunities for digital phenotyping of individuals in research and clinical settings. Beyond providing opportunities for advanced data analytics with data science and machine learning approaches, digital technologies offer solutions to several of the existing barriers in research practice that have resulted in biased samples.
Methods: A participant-driven, precision brain health monitoring digital platform has been introduced to two longitudinal cohort studies, the Boston University Alzheimer's Disease Research Center (BU ADRC) and the Bogalusa Heart Study (BHS).
More than 75% of patients presenting to level I trauma centers in the United States with suspicion of TBI sufficient to require a clinical computed tomography scan report injury-related symptoms 3 months later. There are currently no approved treatments, and few clinical trials have evaluated possible treatments. Efficient trials will require subject inclusion and exclusion criteria that balance cost-effective recruitment with enrolling individuals with a higher chance of benefiting from the interventions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWorldwide, there are nearly 10 million new cases of dementia annually, of which Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common. New measures are needed to improve the diagnosis of individuals with cognitive impairment due to various etiologies. Here, we report a deep learning framework that accomplishes multiple diagnostic steps in successive fashion to identify persons with normal cognition (NC), mild cognitive impairment (MCI), AD, and non-AD dementias (nADD).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImportance: Hearing and vision problems are individually associated with increased dementia risk, but the impact of having concurrent hearing and vision deficits, ie, dual sensory impairment (DSI), on risk of dementia, including its major subtypes Alzheimer disease (AD) and vascular dementia (VaD), is not well known.
Objective: To evaluate whether DSI is associated with incident dementia in older adults.
Design, Setting, And Participants: This prospective cohort study from the Cardiovascular Health Study (CHS) was conducted between 1992 and 1999, with as many as 8 years of follow-up.
Symptom endorsement after traumatic brain injury (TBI) is common acutely post-injury and is associated with other adverse outcomes. Prevalence of persistent symptoms has been debated, especially in mild TBI (mTBI). A cohort of participants ≥17 years with TBI ( = 2039), 257 orthopedic trauma controls (OTCs), and 300 friend controls (FCs) were enrolled in the TRACK-TBI study and evaluated at 2 weeks and 3, 6, and 12 months post-injury using the Rivermead Post-Concussion Symptoms Questionnaire (RPQ).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Head Trauma Rehabil
September 2022
Objective: To examine the association between hearing impairment and cognitive function after traumatic brain injury (TBI).
Setting: A total of 18 level I trauma centers throughout the United States in the T ransforming R esearch a nd C linical K nowledge in TBI (TRACK-TBI) study.
Participants: From February 2014 to June 2018, a total of 2697 participants with TBI were enrolled in TRACK-TBI.
Background: Integrated community case management (CCM) has led to reductions in child mortality in Malawi resulting from illnesses such as malaria, pneumonia, and diarrhea. However, adherence to CCM guidelines is often poor, potentially leading to inappropriate clinical decisions and poor outcomes. We determined the impact of an e-CCM app on the referral, reconsultation, and hospitalization rates of children presenting to village clinics in Malawi.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Ophthalmic conditions and dementia appear to overlap and may share common pathways, but research has not differentiated dementia subtypes.
Methods: Diagnoses of cataracts, age-related macular degeneration (AMD), diabetic retinopathy (DR), and glaucoma were based on medical histories and International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision (ICD-9) codes for 3375 participants from the Cardiovascular Health Study. Dementia, including Alzheimer's disease (AD) and vascular dementia (VaD), was classified using standardized research criteria.
Alzheimers Dement (Amst)
July 2020
Introduction: Hearing and vision loss are independently associated with dementia, but the impact of dual sensory impairment (DSI) on dementia risk is not well understood.
Methods: Self-reported measures of hearing and vision were taken from 2051 participants at baseline from the Gingko Evaluation of Memory Study. Dementia status was ascertained using standardized criteria.
The spontaneously immortalized murine calvarial cell line MC3T3-E1 and its derivative subclones are widely used models of osteoblast biology. Many investigators have reported conflicting data under seemingly similar experimental conditions, though the specific subclone studied is often not specified. The purpose of this study was to directly compare the commercially available MC3T3-E1 subclones 4, 14, and 24 in terms of responsiveness to osteogenic induction media and/or stimulation with rhPTH[1-34].
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe interaction of folate and alcohol consumption has been shown to have an antagonistic effect on the risk of oral cancer. Studies have demonstrated that increased intake of folate decreases the risk of oral cancer, while greater alcohol consumption has an opposite effect. However, what is poorly understood is the biological interaction of these two dietary factors in relation to carcinogenesis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInsulin resistance results in dysregulated hepatic gluconeogenesis that contributes to obesity-related hyperglycemia and progression of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). Recent studies show that MAPK phosphatase-3 (MKP-3) promotes gluconeogenic gene transcription in hepatoma cells, but little is known about the physiological role of MKP-3 in vivo. Here, we have shown that expression of MKP-3 is markedly increased in the liver of diet-induced obese mice.
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