Alzheimer’s has become one of the fastest growing forms of dementia, with more than 5 million people suffering from the terminal disease in the United States alone, and 57 million around the globe.
Each year, there are 10 million new cases, which has many medical experts characterizing Alzheimer’s as an epidemic, as well as one of the greatest health challenges of our century.
So far, there is no cure for the disease, though there are increasingly effective treatments that can slow its progression. But they only work if the disease can be caught soon enough.
That’s a problem, because symptoms do not usually show up until the disease has progressed too far. Many of the tests that could detect it earlier are expensive, and sometimes painful or invasive.
That dynamic could be changing soon thanks to work being done by Wyoming technology company Lunavi.
Tapped by Florida-based i-Function, Lunavi has helped to digitize a puzzle game-style of test that promises both quick and accurate results.
The test isn’t really new, said Peter Kallestrup, co-founder and CEO of I-Function Inc. It was developed more than 30 years ago by a University of Miami doctor named David Loewenstein, who is also an advisor for I-Function.
There are now some new perspectives on how to interpret the test and thanks to Wyoming’s Lunavi, there’s now a digital tool to administer it in ways that small, community clinical settings can manage.
“This has been used in various locations around the United States,” Kallestrup said. “But, like a lot of other tests, it was paper-and-pencil-based, and it had to be administered by a trained professional.”
That made it a time-consuming procedure that was only available at well-equipped and resourced locations.
Small community clinics and doctor’s offices didn’t have the bandwidth to offer it.
“What we did was, we basically licensed the technology for the test, and with Lunavi, we moved it into a state-of-the-art technology-available tool,” Kallestrup said. “It takes about 15 minutes to do and everything is self-administered.”
Fun Word Games, Serious Diagnostic
Many people, even when they’re young, have walked into a room and forgotten what it is they went there to do. Or, they’ve laid keys down and forgotten just where they laid them.
As people age, they often expect such things to happen more frequently. It also can’t help but leave people wondering whether it’s a sign or symptom of something more serious.
The tests Lunavi and iFunction have teamed up to provide can help tell the difference between normal forgetfulness and the mild cognitive impairment that precedes dementia like Alzheimer’s.
The tests, however, are not like those dreaded algebra exams people took in school. There’s no effort to trap or trick. These are more like word games.
“There are so many of these list-learning tests,” Kallestrup said. “And what it basically is, we have three categories of words. Say we have fruit, musical instruments and articles of clothing. And then we basically tell people, ‘Here’s a list, five words of each, and we say them out loud to basically imprint them in your brain as much as possible.’”
After the words are repeated a few times, the person taking the tests repeats back as many words in each category as they can remember. That’s then repeated with the same category, but different lists of words.
“With any test, there’s always a little bit of apprehension in the beginning,” Kallestrup said. “But once people start doing it and they sit in front of the screen and they read it and they have a little headset on, they’re in their own little world. It’s really not a big issue.”
In fact, of 700 people taking the test, all finished it relatively quickly.
“The most common comment afterward was, ‘This was not so bad,’” Kallestrup said.
Accessible Anywhere There’s Internet
Initially, there were some concerns about digitizing the test and losing the human touch in the process, Kallestrup said. That turned out to be an unexpected strength.
“People were saying to us, ‘We actually like it because we don’t feel judged. This is very sensitive, it’s personal. So, it was refreshing that we did not feel judged,’” Kallestrup said.
The digitized procedure has been tested against the old paper-and-pencil process and has shown itself just as effective as the old version, Kallestrup added.
“There are a number of tools available today, and some are pretty good at finding individuals with mild cognitive impairment; however, they find it kind of late,” he said. “You want to find this as early as possible and that’s what this new test is really good at. It’s really good at identifying people who are pre-symptomatic with the earliest signs of cognitive impairment before you see serious brain degeneration, neurodegeneration.”
The test is also more accessible since it can be delivered over most any electronic device that has an internet connection, making it easier for smaller community clinics to offer it as an inexpensive and painless screening tool.
“Today, if you want to know whether you are likely to get Alzheimer’s disease, you either need a genetic test, which is expensive and many people don’t want to do it, or you need a blood biomarker test, which is also definitely not cheap,” Kallestrup said. “Plus, a lot of people don’t like to get poked with a needle. Or you need a PET scan, which is over $3,000.”
Treatments to slow the disease can be very effective when the disease is caught early, he added.
“It’s not like it used to be when your doctor would tell you, ‘All right, get your affairs in order,’” Kallestrup said. “It’s a different world today.”
Artificial Intelligence Helped Develop New Tool
It’s also a different world in terms of what digital tools can do, Lunavi’s Senior Vice President of Digital Transformation Mike Douglas told Cowboy State Daily.
Lunavi’s digital tool uses an artificial intelligence platform alongside high-accuracy voice recognition to find subtle cognitive changes long before traditional measures can do it.
“I think it would have been a lot harder to build a system like this, that’s completely voice-driven, a few years ago,” he said. “But the newer technology and speech-to-text capabilities really helped us bring this to life and to work efficiently across both English and Spanish.”
Accuracy was key, Douglas added. The program had to work across not only two languages, but across different regions of the United States. It had to hear accents from California to Texas and from New York to Florida, and all points in between.
“A lot of these tools use context,” Douglas said. “So like, the words you’re saying in a sentence kind of helps figure out different words. But in this case, we’re working with a very short response, so it doesn’t have that benefit of a full sentence or paragraph to determine that.”
Getting to 99%-plus accuracy was the hard part of the project.
“We had to do a lot of work there,” Douglas said. “And the nice thing is we had a lot of data, so we were able to use that for testing to figure out the accuracy and keep working to kind of raise the bar on that.”
The diagnostic tool doesn’t require any type of FDA approvals, though it’s something the company could decide to apply for at some point. The results have also been backed up by research supported by the National Institutes of Health.
Kallestrup believes the test can be a useful screening tool for an annual physical, something people could take each year that would help flag whether there are any problems as early as possible.
The challenge now, Kallestrup said, is just getting the word out that this new diagnostic, voice-driven tool that detects Alzheimer’s early is available.
“We’re going to make this broadly available in the United States to as many healthcare systems as possible,” he said. “But so, it’s really a matter of getting noticed. Because a lot of people seriously don’t know we exist.
“When I present this program, they go, like, ‘Really, is that available?’ Because there are 1,000 new tools coming out all the time, so it’s trying to penetrate that noise.”
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
