Mild Cognitive Impairment Tied to Delayed Responses in Gaze and Speech

At the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference annual meeting, researchers presented a study that showed that individuals with mild cognitive impairment had delayed responses in both gaze and speech behaviors compared with healthy controls.

In this exclusive MedPage Today video, Michael J. Kleiman, PhD, of the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, describes the findings from his research.

Following is a transcript of his remarks:

My study mainly focused on examining the combination of both gaze behavior and speech behavior, so gaze being eye movement behavior. There’s a lot of research investigating both eye movement behavior and speech behavior individually, especially looking at mild cognitive impairment, which is what I focused on.

But there aren’t a lot of studies that combine both of them. So I was really interested in seeing if we can use the same task to collect both eye movements and speech and use the intersection of those to maybe identify something else going on in both mild cognitive impairment, as well as preclinical Alzheimer’s.

So what I did was I administered a number of tasks. The one that I examined in this poster was the traditional Cookie Theft Picture description task where individuals look at a black and white image and then have to describe everything going on in that image. I collected their eye movements during the tasks, so I looked at exactly what they were looking at while they were describing the picture, and I also collected, of course, their audio, and I was able to combine the two because I recorded both simultaneously.

And so I was able to, essentially, as someone looked at each object, I started a metaphorical timer. So if they looked at, say, the cookie jar on the top left of the image, the first time they looked at the object, I started a timer. And then I ended that timer as soon as they said the words “cookie jar,” or they described the cookie jar in some way.

And what I found was that not only was there a difference between mild cognitive impairment and healthy controls, there’s actually more difference between preclinical patients and healthy controls. So, specifically in the cookie jar, the man washing dishes, and the scene outside, so that’d be the woman mowing the lawn and the cat playing with some birds.

This is, of course, a very exploratory study, and the types of equipment that we used are very expensive and wouldn’t normally be used in clinical practice, but theoretically could be in the near future.

Speech itself has been used. There are a number of different organizations and companies that are collecting speech and analyzing it for clinicians. Those include Winterlight, which I believe was bought out by Cambridge Cognition, and ki:elements, as well as a number of other companies. So those could be used in clinical practice.

For the eye movements, there are only a handful of companies that are actually examining those, and there are not a lot of clinical markers yet. But in the very near future, I mean eye trackers are coming down in price, and we should be able to hopefully collect this type of information in clinical practice and potentially maybe both identify preclinical Alzheimer’s, identify the risk of developing mild cognitive impairment in the near future, and especially for pharmaceutical research, track the progression of cognitive impairment in preclinical Alzheimer’s disease.