Zee Media Bureau
New York: A good news for Alzheimer's patients. A simple and cheap test at home may detect early symptoms of cognitive issues, including Alzheimer's disease.
Researchers have developed an at-home test which is cheap and self-administered and that can help doctors spot early cognitive loss or dementia in their patients.
Self-administered gero-cognitive examination or SAGE test as it is called,takes less than 15 minutes to complete and is quite a reliable tool for evaluating cognitive abilities.
Researchers visited 45 community events where they asked people to take a simple, self-administered test to screen for early cognitive loss or dementia.
“Of the 1,047 people who took the simple pen-and-paper test, 28 percent were identified with cognitive impairment,” said Douglas Scharre, who developed the test with his team at Ohio State.
The SAGE's self-administered feature - pen-and-paper format - and four equivalent interchangeable forms allows it to be given in almost any setting and does not require any staff time to administer or to set up a computer.
Orientation, language, reasoning/computation, visuospatial and memory abilities are the parameters on which the patients are tested on.
This test allows the doctors to get a baseline of cognitive function in their patients, so they can follow them for these problems over time.
