Alzheimer's researcher: 'It's definitely a wonderful time to be working in this field'
Dr. Louisa Thompson is a neuropsychologist at Butler Hospital's memory and aging program and an assistant professor at Brown University.
In both capacities, she is involved in Alzheimer's research.
Her focus is on early detection and prevention.
"We're going to need a lot of tools in our tool belt for early detection with Alzheimer's," Thompson said.
In conjunction with researchers at the University of Rhode Island, she’s looking into retinal imaging.
"Retinal imaging is a very promising approach for screening for Alzheimer's Disease, because it's so much easier to take photographs of the retina than it is of the brain," Thompson said.
It's called the ARIAS study: Atlas for Retinal Imaging in Alzheimer's.
"Our baseline research for the ARIAS study will be coming out early next year," Thompson said.
The study is preliminary, but she says it looks good.
"We do already see that there are differences in the retina between individuals who have elevated amyloid plaque in the brain, and those who don't," she said.
It's a buildup of those amyloid plaques that are believed to be responsible for Alzheimer's.
Thompson is also working on app-based research, which is being funded by The Alzheimer's Association.
The app-based research involves brain games.
"They might involve sort of matching different colors and shapes and then holding those colors and shapes in mind for a couple minutes as a way of assessing memory," Thompson said.
"This could be a way to make screening for Alzheimer's more accessible,” she added.
They’re preparing to embark on what's known as the Bio Finder-Brown Study, a collaboration with a research team in Sweden.
"Where we're comparing blood biomarkers to retinal markers to digital cognitive markers and finally brain markers - and understand which tools are best at which stages of the disease, what's more accurate,” Thompson said.