The eyes can reveal a lot about our brain health. Certainly, eye problems can be one of the early signs of cognitive decline.
Ours Latest Research Show Loss of visual sensitivity means that dementia can be predicted 12 years before it is diagnosed.
Our study was based on 8,623 healthy people in Norfolk, England, and was followed up for many years. By the end of the study, 537 participants had developed dementia, indicating the factors preceded this diagnosis.
At the start of the study, participants were asked to take a visual sensitivity test. For testing, they had to press a button as soon as they saw a triangle formed in a field of moving dots.
People with dementia were much slower to look at this triangle on screen than those who remained without dementia.
So why does that happen?
Visual issues may be an early indicator of cognitive decline, as toxic amyloid plaques associated with Alzheimer’s disease can first affect brain regions associated with vision, and parts of the brain may be damaged as memory-related parts of the brain are damaged. Therefore, visual tests may find deficits before memory tests do.
There are a few Other aspects The ability to see the contours of an object (contrast sensitivity) and visual processing affected by Alzheimer’s (ability to see the blue-green spectrum is affected early in dementia).
Another An early indication of Alzheimer’s disease is the deficit of “inhibition control” of eye movement, where distracting stimuli appear to be more readily paying attention.
People with Alzheimer’s disease seem to have the problem of ignoring distracting stimuli.
If dementia makes it difficult to avoid distracting irritation, these issues can increase the risk of driving Accidents – What we are currently investigating at Loughborough University.
Recognizes the face
we have Some evidence This suggests that people with dementia tend to inefficiently process new people’s faces. In other words, they don’t follow the usual pattern of scanning the faces of the person they are talking to.
In healthy people, this is from the eyes to the nose. Do this, “engraved” your face and remember it later. People can sometimes feel when the person they are talking to doesn’t do this.
In fact, some doctors who work with people with dementia realize that someone has dementia when they meet.
People with dementia can sometimes seem lost as they move their eyes to scan their environment and don’t scan their environment, including the faces of people they just met.
After that, you will not be able to recognize people later, as you have not engraved their features.
Therefore, this early problem of not recognizing the people you just met may be related to effective eye movements of new faces, rather than pure memory impairment.
Can eye movements improve memory?
However, visual sensitivity is related to memory performance (even using non-visual tests), so we also tested whether it helps us get more eye movements.
Previous research on this issue is mixed, but some are mixed the study I discovered that eye movements can improve memory. Perhaps it explains why we found those people Watch more TV and read more Less than people with good memory and at a lower risk of dementia.
While watching and reading TV, our eyes flick back and forth across pages and TV screens.
However, readers tend to be educated often. Proper education provides brain protection, resulting in fewer negative consequences when brain connections are damaged.
others the studyleft to right and right eye movements were immediately performed (two eye movements per second) and we found that autobiographical memory (your life story).
However, some studies suggest that only this beneficial effect of eye movement benefits right-handed people. I don’t know why this is.
Despite these exciting findings, there is still not much treatment for memory problems using intentional eye movements in older people. Furthermore, despite the possibilities of eye movement techniques, using eye movement deficits as a diagnosis is not a regular function.
One bottleneck is accessing eye tracking technology, which is expensive and requires training to use and analyze.
Until cheap and easy-to-use eye trackers are available, it is not possible outside the laboratory to use eye movements as a diagnostic tool for early stage Alzheimer’s disease.
Eef HogervorstProfessor of Biopsychology, Loughborough University; Ahmet Begdedoctoral candidates, neuroticism, Loughborough Universityand Tom Wilcocksonsenior lecturer in psychology, Loughborough University
This article has been republished conversation Under the Creative Commons license. Please read Original article.
An earlier version of this article was published in April 2024.
