Improving Early Alzheimers Detection in Women by Integrating Multimodal Data Into Clinical Decision Tools with Iris Broce-Diaz Ph.D.

And so Alzheimer's disease is a progressive neurodegenerative condition that impairs your memory and cognition and affects millions of people worldwide.

What I'm trying to do is develop these accessible, non-invasive, cost-effective tools that can help primary care and neurologists in an early detection of Alzheimer's disease.

Really, to create a tool and deploy it in the clinics and make it accessible here and worldwide, we're starting with standard of care tools.

um and so what's considered standard of care is very different in a high resource center versus a low resource center versus here versus latin america versus europe and that's really interesting but we are starting here at ucsd and diagnosing dementia really does start in primary care and so usually like a patient will report a concern or the family member And then the primary care, they don't have a lot of time, but they'll order some standard labs.

They might do a screening assessment like an MMSE or a MOCA.

And then depending on that, if it's abnormal, then they might go ahead and send the referral to neurology.

Here in the US, standard of care, or at least here at UCSD in our memory clinic, it depends on your insurance or whatnot, but Medicare at least will reimburse an MRI.

primary care physicians know what to do with that.

They rely on the radiologist, right? And so then what ends up happening is you go ahead and you send the referral to neurology.

Then what we're trying to do is we're trying to, I'm working with Amara Mondavi here in the family medicine to really support.

Usually they send the referral when someone's abnormal on a cognitive assessment.

The problem with that is that the disease process for Alzheimer's disease starts years before the clinical symptoms.

We're talking like 10 years.

By the time you're sending them to the referral, it's a little late.

Now with the anti-amyloid therapies, it's really important to identify those people who are imminent risk so that they can actually, if they want to go ahead and start treatments, they can.

This is when they actually qualify for these treatments.

It's really trying to work with primary care and neurology to create a tool where we can send better referrals, but also support patients in getting treatments.