There is as yet no cure for AD. When a disease-modifying therapy will become available, it will be essential to administer this treatment in the very earliest stages of the disease, before pathological changes in the brain are widespread. Therefore, identifying the presence of AD in the pre-dementia ‘prodromal’ or even the ‘preclinical’ phase is essential. Eye-tracking has the potential to deliver biomarkers for the early diagnosis and monitoring of the disease. Please find hereafter 2 recent clinical papers showing promising results
Researchers have shown results confirming that the latency and the error rate in the antisaccade task are promising biomarkers for dementia. Given that people with MCI are more likely to develop dementia due to AD than cognitively healthy adults, and in particular that people with amnesic Mild Cognitive Impairment (aMCI) are at the highest risk of progressing to a full dementia syndrome, this may also offer additional prognostic biomarkers for predicting which people with a diagnosis of MCI are more likely to progress to dementia due to AD.
In a large review comprising a total sample size of 35 studies with 2435 subjects, 1252 controls, and 1183 patients (386 MCI and 797 AD patients), researchers from South Korea suggested that the prosaccade and antisaccade latency and error rate could be used to distinguish patients from controls and MCI from AD within patient groups.