![]() The amazing thing is that with that data, you can of course give preventative coaching and help people years before any life impairment. If you do a battery of tests, targetting different areas of the brain, and track eye gaze (not just gaze, but many parameters that you can pick up from gaze tracking), then you can predict a decade ahead of normal testing, not only dementia, but what kind of dementia. I worked at a company that was searching for funding for this, so I and my neuroscientist coworker did a deep literature review, and frankly it was amazing. It turns out you can prediagnose a lot of dementia with gaze-tracking and cognitive tests. I did a deeeep dive into this a year ago. Even though the condition can't be cured, you can access things like cognitive stimulation therapy, group reminiscence therapy, etc. There's also access to supportive care that comes with a diagnosis. It's also important to do a medication review and stop or reduce or switch to an alternative (if appropriate) any medications that will make cognitive impairment worse, specifically meds with a high anti-cholinergic burden. Then if it's vascular dementia, the progress can be slowed by optimising risk factors like blood pressure, diabetes control, etc. There are medications to help sometimes with dementia, although it depends on the type and severity, and while the medications do work to slow things down, the effect is moderate at best. It's also important to remember that in older people, depression can be difficult to distinguish from dementia. It can be simple things to treat like nutritional deficiencies or an underactive thyroid. It's important to rule these out before diagnosing dementia in anyone with symptoms of cognitive impairment. There are many dementia-mimics that are actually reversible/treatable conditions. New to reddit? Click here! Get flair in /r/science Previous Science AMA's Repeat or flagrant offenders will be banned.Comments dismissing established findings and fields of science must provide evidence.Criticism of published work should assume basic competence of the researchers and reviewers.Non-professional personal anecdotes will be removed.No off-topic comments, memes, low-effort comments or jokes.All submissions must have flair assigned.No blogspam, images, videos, or infographics.Research must be less than 6 months old.No editorialized, sensationalized, or biased titles.No summaries of summaries, re-hosted press releases, or reposts.Directly link to published peer-reviewed research or media summary.
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