The stories about a grandma getting lost on the way home from the grocery store, or the grandpa who relies on GPS to get to his daily coffee shop are more than just anecdotes. There’s research that backs this real evidence of people losing their way that indicates a bigger problem.
Problems navigating new surroundings crop up before memory loss, and long before any clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, according to a recent study published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.
Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis had study participants use patterns and landmarks to find their way through a maze on the computer. They were divided into three groups – early-stage Alzheimer’s patients, undiagnosed people with early markers for Alzheimer’s (considered “preclinical Alzheimer’s”), and a control group of clinically normal people.
The results showed people with preclinical Alzheimer’s had more difficulty learning the locations of objects.
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“These findings suggest that the wayfinding difficulties experienced by people with preclinical Alzheimer’s disease are in part related to trouble acquiring the environmental information,” said senior author Denise Head, associate professor of psychological and brain sciences.
The researchers acknowledged the study’s limitations, but explained that these tests that asses cognitive mapping “could represent a powerful tool for detecting the very earliest Alzheimer’s disease-related changes in cognition.”
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