Carlos Solis
Struggling to navigate unfamiliar places may be a stronger early sign of dementia than the classic forgetting where you left your keys.
A new study finds that, even before standard tests pick up cognitive decline, small orientation problems can be an early warning sign of dementia—especially Alzheimer’s disease.
Researchers ran a virtual reality experiment, testing about 100 volunteers, ages 55 to 89, on their spatial navigation abilities.
The results showed that participants with subjective cognitive decline (SCD)—a condition in which people feel their memory is worsening despite normal clinical tests—were less accurate at navigation than their healthy peers.
“People with SCD are at increased risk of developing dementia later in life,” said Professor Thomas Wolbers, head of the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) and a co-author of the study.
During the experiment, participants wore VR headsets and walked through a digital landscape, reported BBC Science Focus. They followed a ball along a winding path, then had to indicate the starting point — by turning around and looking back to where their journey began.
Overall, volunteers performed normally on standard memory and thinking tests. However, those with SCD consistently made larger navigation errors.
“These orientation difficulties were not related to movement dynamics, such as walking speed or frequently looking down, but rather to cognitive impairments,” said Dr. Vladyslava Segen, a researcher at DZNE and the study’s lead author.
The authors say people with SCD may have suffered from “memory leakage”—difficulty tracking the sequence of steps they took. The researchers think this comes from dysfunction in grid cells, neurons that build the brain’s mental coordinate system.
The team hopes that this kind of spatial testing could soon become a useful addition to existing dementia diagnostic tools.
“In the long term, I see potential for its use in clinical practice, particularly for the early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease,” said Professor Wolbers. “However, this method needs to be further tested and simplified first,” he added.
Photo: Unsplash
