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

[laughs] And, um, so, um, I have this grant that I just recently got awarded from the Welcome Care Leap program.

Um, and really, their whole focus is on Alzheimer's disease prevention in women.

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

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

And so really, to create a tool and deploy it in the clinics and make it accessible here and worldwide, uh, we're kinda 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 in, at UCSD.

And, um, 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, like, order some standard labs.

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

And then depending on that, um, if there's...

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

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

Like, do all primary care physicians know what to do with that? Not really.

Rely on the radiologist, right? And so then, um, what ends up happening is, like, you go ahead and you send the referral to primary-- uh, to neurology.

Um, and then so what we're trying to do is we're trying to...

I'm working with Amar Mandavi here in the family medicine to really kind of, like, support...

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

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

We're talking, like, ten years.

And so by the time you're sending them to the referral, it's kind of a little late.

So now with the anti-amyloid therapies, it's really important to identify those people who are, like, imminent risk, um, so that, you know, they can actually, if they wanna go ahead and start treatments, they can.

Um, and this is when they actually qualify for these treatments, right? So it's really, um, trying to work with primary care and neurology to create a tool where we can send better referrals, but also, like, support patients in getting treatments.