Alzheimer’s Prediction May Be Found in Writing Tests

Alzheimer’s Prediction May Be Found in Writing Tests

IBM researchers trained artificial intelligence to pick up hints of changes in language ahead of the onset of neurological diseases.

Is it possible to predict who will develop Alzheimer’s disease simply by looking at writing patterns years before there are symptoms?

According to a new study by IBM researchers, the answer is yes.

And, they and others say that Alzheimer’s is just the beginning. People with a wide variety of neurological illnesses have distinctive language patterns that, investigators suspect, may serve as early warning signs of their diseases.

For the Alzheimer’s study, the researchers looked at a group of 80 men and women in their 80s — half had Alzheimer’s and the others did not. But, seven and a half years earlier, all had been cognitively normal.

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Alzheimer’s Prediction May Be Found in Writing Tests

The men and women were participants in the Framingham Heart Study, a long-running federal research effort that requires regular physical and cognitive tests. As part of it, they took a writing test before any of them had developed Alzheimer’s that asks subjects to describe a drawing of a boy standing on an unsteady stool and reaching for a cookie jar on a high shelf while a woman, her back to him, is oblivious to an overflowing sink.

The researchers examined the subjects’ word usage with an artificial intelligence program that looked for subtle differences in language. It identified one group of subjects who were more repetitive in their word usage at that earlier time when all of them were cognitively normal. These subjects also made errors, such as spelling words wrongly or inappropriately capitalizing them, and they used telegraphic language, meaning language that has a simple grammatical structure and is missing subjects and words like “the,” “is” and “are.”

The members of that group turned out to be the people who developed Alzheimer’s disease.

The A.I. program predicted, with 75 percent accuracy, who would get Alzheimer’s disease, according to results published recently in The Lancet journal EClinicalMedicine.