Sea Hero Quest game ‘could help doctors spot earliest signs of Alzheimer’s – by testing sense of direction’
A NEW game could one day help doctors diagnose people in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, it emerged today.
The app gather information on a player's navigation skills and spatial awareness - which scientists hope will help them design a new way of spotting the early signs of dementia.
Sea Hero Quest has already been used as part of the largest dementia study to date, with 2.4million players contributing to help scientists learn more about the disease.
By playing the game they have helped experts at University College London and the University of East Anglia, create the first ever global benchmark for human spatial navigation.
That means the scientists now have an idea of what can be considered normal, and the signs that might indicate if a person is in the early stages of dementia.
They hope their findings will set new standards in dementia research and pave the way for the game, developed by Deutsche Telekom, to be used by health professionals as a tool to diagnose the disease in the future.
The ability to diagnose dementia in the early stages, well before patients exhibit any signs of general memory loss, would be a milestone
Dr Hugo Spiers
Dr Hugo Spiers, one of the experts to lead the study, said: "This is the only study of its kind, on this scale, to date.
"Its accuracy greatly exceeds that of all previous research in this area.
"The findings the game is yielding have enormous potential to support vital developments in dementia research.
"The ability to diagnose dementia in the early stages, well before patients exhibit any signs of general memory loss, would be a milestone.
"This study is thus now giving us the opportunity to make a real difference to the lives of millions of people living with dementia and those at risk in the future."
Dr Spiers team found that by analysing the results of the current 2.4million players, that spatial navigation abilities begin to decline from early adulthood - as early as 19 years old.
And the data reveals, unsurprisingly, that the declines continues as a person ages.
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For example, those aged 19 were 74 per cent likely to accurately hit a target during the game, compared to 46 per cent of those aged 75.
The findings are in stark contrast to past studies, carried out on a much smaller scale, that suggest this decline begins much later in life.
The researchers warn that the regions of the brain that support spatial navigation may be more vulnerable in people with dementia than those linked to memory.
That is despite the fact that memory loss is typically the symptom people most associate with dementia.
Dr Spiers and his colleagues hope the Sea Hero Quest game may now offer the opportunity to detect these very early changes in the brain, long before a person suffering dementia begins to experience memory loss.
Hilary Evans, chief executive of Alzheimer's Research UK, who is co-funding the study, said the new insights into how humans navigate have only been made possible thanks to "a new kind of collaboration in dementia research".
"A health challenge as complex as dementia demands we approach studies innovatively," she said.
"The early data that has very quickly been generated by Sea Hero Quest should inspire other corporations to consider what assets they might bring to research into dementia or any of our most seemingly intractable medical conditions."
Dr Axel Wehmeier, managing director at Telekom Healthcare Solutions said: "We are excited to announce that we have taken this one step further and are now working with the scientists to adapt Sea Hero Quest for use in a clinical setting."