Virtual reality game will help detect early signs of Alzheimer’s

A new virtual reality game will be used to spot early signs of Alzheimer’s disease by assessing how well people navigate their surroundings.

Researchers at University College London (UCL) are recruiting healthy volunteers over the age of 40 for the Virtual Reality Navigation Study. This will involve taking part in two 90-minute sessions at the university’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in London. In the first session, participants will play a game called the Cave Crystal Quest while wearing virtual reality goggles. They must complete several levels by exploring a cave and finding a hidden crystal, and will then be asked to complete a questionnaire about their experiences and how easy they found it to navigate the game.

In the second session, the participants will complete written questionnaires about their cognitive abilities. Researchers will compare these questionnaires with the data collected on their ability to navigate in the first session. The data will then be used to determine a participant’s ability to navigate.

Struggling to follow directions may be early symptom

A common symptom of Alzheimer’s disease is feeling lost even in familiar places. This is especially true of people aged 65 and over who are in the early stages of the disease.

The UCL researchers hope that similar tests could be developed to help clinicians to assess the early stages of Alzheimer’s by revealing problems with navigation, such as difficulty following a route or getting lost. “We are developing innovative, cross-cultural tests to identify specific errors in spatial navigation that could signal early cognitive decline due to Alzheimer’s dementia,” said Dr Andrea Castegnaro of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience.

Neil Burgess, professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at UCL and the chief investigator on the study, said: “Problems with navigation such as getting lost or struggling to follow directions may be nothing to worry about, but they can be an early sign of Alzheimer’s dementia. Finding a way to assess these problems at an early stage could help us diagnose and track the progress of the condition in a less invasive way than with current tests.

“We are excited at the potential that this game – and virtual reality more broadly – might have for assessing the cognitive impact of Alzheimer’s disease.”

Navigational problems may develop decades before other symptoms

The study builds on earlier research by UCL scientists, who used virtual reality to test the spatial navigation of 100 asymptomatic midlife adults, aged 43-66, from the PREVENT-Dementia prospective cohort study. Participants were required to navigate a virtual environment while wearing VR headsets.

All the participants had a hereditary or physiological risk of Alzheimer’s disease, due to either a gene (the APOE-ε4 allele) that puts them at risk of the condition, a family history of Alzheimer’s disease, or lifestyle risk factors such as low levels of physical activity. They were about 25 years younger than their estimated age of dementia onset.

The researchers found that people at greater risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, regardless of risk factor, were selectively impaired on the VR navigation task, without a corresponding impairment on other cognitive tests. The authors said their findings, published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association, suggested that impairments in spatial navigation may begin to develop years, or even decades, before the onset of any other symptoms. Dr Coco Newton, the first author, said: “Our results indicated that this type of navigation behaviour change might represent the very earliest diagnostic signal in the Alzheimer’s disease continuum – when people move from being unimpaired to showing manifestation of the disease.”

The Virtual Reality Navigation Study is recruiting 50 participants through Join Dementia Research and is funded by the Wellcome Trust. In order to take part, participants must not have any pre-existing cognitive impairments or be taking medication for a mental health condition.