Contact: Maneesh Kuruvilla, Matthew Kirkcaldie
Navigation ability and pre-clinical Alzheimer’s disease
Evidence of episodic memory impairments offers one of the earliest cognitive signs of Alzheimer’s disease onset. It is for this reason that tests of episodic memory are held up as the current gold standard of Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis. However, there is a growing body of work suggesting that some of the brain areas to be first impacted by Alzheimer’s disease pathology (e.g. entorhinal cortex) support spatial navigation. This project aims to characterise aspects of navigation performance that rely on these brain areas to develop diagnostic tests for preclinical Alzheimer’s disease that are potentially more sensitive than current tests of episodic memory.
Objectives:
1.To determine navigation characteristics of individuals “at-risk” of Alzheimer’s disease in the preclinical stage.
2.To evaluate the types of technologies that a) promote aspects of real-world navigation b) are sufficiently sensitive and scalable enough to determine navigation characteristics of individuals “at-risk” of Alzheimer’s disease in the preclinical stage.
Research Team:
- Dr Maneesh Kuruvilla
- Dr Matthew Kirkcaldie
- Aidan Bindoff
- Yuan Tian (PhD student)
Collaborators:
- Dr Winyu Chinthammit (Information and Communication Technology - ICT, College of Sciences and Engineering)
- Dr Mira Park (Information and Communication Technology - ICT, College of Sciences and Engineering)
- Dr Soonja Yeom (Information and Communication Technology - ICT, College of Sciences and Engineering)
Funding:
UTAS cross-college PhD scholarship
