At-home ambulatory EEG for early dementia diagnosis
Supervisors:
Dr Mick Craig, School of Psychology & Neuroscience
Dr Guillaume Rousselet, School of Psychology & Neuroscience
Prof Neil Basu, School of Infection & Immunity
Summary:
Dementia is a devastating syndrome characterized by memory problems, confusion, and behavioural changes that prevent people from performing everyday activities. It is the leading cause of dependency and disability amongst older people, resulting in a global economic cost of ~$1.3 trillion. New disease-modifying therapies are starting to emerge for treating Alzheimer’s disease but the targeted use of these therapies depends upon early identification of affected individuals and, as yet, no clinically-validated biomarkers of dementia are available that can be deployed at scale in public health services.
We have found that changes in brain activity during sleep could provide an early indicator of dementia before behavioural changes are apparent. This PhD project has two aims. Firstly, to analyse existing clinical EEG data to find markers of cortical, thalamic and hippocampal activity during natural sleep. Secondly, to deploy open-source EEG systems that can be used at home by healthy individuals to determine whether home-EEG systems are suitable for large-scale, longitudinal population-level screening for dementia.