Grant: DRA: Canada Impact+ Research Training Awards - Doctoral

"Alzheimer’s disease (AD) begins many years before memory problems appear. During this silent or “preclinical” stage, changes in the brain slowly accumulate, but most standard memory tests are not sensitive enough to detect them. Identifying these early changes is essential for prevention, early intervention, and reducing the long-term impact of dementia on individuals, families, and the healthcare system. Recent scientific advances now allow researchers to measure AD-related proteins in the blood, including a marker called phosphorylated tau-217 (pTau217), which can indicate whether someone may be in the earliest stages of the disease. However, we still lack simple, accessible cognitive tests that can detect very early brain changes and complement these new blood-based tools. My research will test whether a brief visual thinking task can detect very early signs of AD. This task measures how well someone can identify an object that looks slightly different from the others. This ability is supported by the perirhinal cortex, which is one of the first brain regions affected in AD. I will examine whether how well people perform on this task is related to the structure of this brain region (measured using brain scans) and to levels of pTau217. Using data from the Canadian Multi-Ethnic Research on Aging study, which includes older adults from three of Canada’s largest ethnic groups, this project will evaluate whether this visual task can identify people who may be in the earliest stage of AD. "