Detecting dementia earlier

For Aaron Bornstein, UC Irvine associate professor of cognitive sciences, studying age-related memory decline and finding ways to identify markers earlier are quite personal.

"My mom has relatively early-stage dementia," he says. "If we'd had a signature of this early on, we wouldn't have had to scramble and make a lot of the decisions we've had to make in the last couple of years."

Now, with a nearly $4 million National Institute on Aging grant, Bornstein is eager to get to work on the long-term goal: creating an inexpensive, easily accessible assessment for early detection of cognitive decline due to Alzheimer's disease or dementia.

"The idea is to create a test that people can do in their 30s, 40s and 50s and then continue throughout life so we can see the earliest possible sign that something's not normal," he says.

Bornstein is collaborating with Ilana Bennett, a researcher at UC Riverside who did her undergraduate and postdoctoral work at UC Irvine. The two created video games that show memory's role in decision-making.

Rather than what is typically thought of as memory, such as recalling a lunch or someone's name from weeks ago, memory is mostly used to generalize things from the past so people can make sense of the present and imagine the near future - or, in these games, formulate their plans for success.

Hundreds of subjects ranging in age from 18 to in their 80s play the games at UC Irvine's Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, and MRIs are performed on their brains while they do so.

It sounds expensive, and it is. The cost for data collection, highly trained staff and specialized facilities is more than $3 million for five years.

"That level of funding, when you're talking about the dozens or hundreds of labs that do this kind of work, is simply outside the scope of private philanthropy," Bornstein says. "Only the federal government can fund this type of research. The state of California is pretty much the only other entity with the resources to do this. California is the fourth-largest economy in the world - about the size of Germany or Japan. There's no reason we can't fund our higher education to the same degree those countries do."

Advance knowledge that you're at risk for cognitive disease later in life may seem depressing. Most people don't think of themselves as vulnerable in their 30s or 40s. But early detection is accepted as the best intervention and being aware provides powerful motivation to employ well-known preventive steps.

"Taking up new hobbies, exercise, getting involved in new and cognitively demanding activities - these things are very helpful," Bornstein says. "If I were to get a signature in my early 30s that tells me I'm in line for having heart problems, then I would do something to impact my cardiovascular health later."

As exciting as the next few years will be for his team, he has concerns about some of the nonscientific challenges. Attracting and retaining the talented staff necessary is consistently tricky.

"We're not making higher education an attractive career for lots of people," Bornstein says. "These highly skilled people can work in big tech, but they're choosing research and taking an enormous pay cut to do it."

He also worries about the political constraints on higher education: "There's a naive focus on bottom-line cost efficiency, which misses the long-term picture and has for quite some time."

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