News release

From: Society for Neuroscience

New marker for cognitive decline identified

An interaction between two EEG measures of neural activity can reliably predict cognitive decline over the span of a decade. 

As we grow older, our likelihood of cognitive decline, which encompasses the loss of memory, reasoning, and attention, is raised. While a gradual loss of thinking abilities is likely for most of us, accelerated loss in cognition may indicate a bigger health concern, like dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. At the timepoint of disease diagnosis, it is difficult to find effective treatments. Because of this, detecting markers, or predictors, of diseases before their onset is ideal. Electroencephalography, or EEG, is a non-invasive imaging technique for measuring brain activity, which makes it an attractive tool for clinicians. Anna Finley, PhD, from the Institute on Aging at the University of Wisconsin-Madison worked with colleagues spanning the globe in an examination of EEG data from a decade-long study of over 200 participants to identify a marker for cognitive decline. They found it in an interaction between two measures of neural activity: one represents how quickly neurons fire together, and the other measure indicates how “noisy” brain activity is, or how easily excited neurons are. When one marker was high and the other was low, cognitive decline was more severe over time than when markers were both high or low. These data are exciting because they provide evidence for EEG as a clinical tool to help identify patients at risk for accelerated cognitive decline.