New learning-based tool can help predict progression of Alzheimer’s disease

Over 55 million people worldwide are living with dementia, according to the World Health Organization, with Alzheimer’s disease as the most common form.

Researchers from the University of Texas at Arlington said that in addition to physical effects, Alzheimer’s causes psychological, social and economic ramifications not only for the people living with the disease, but also for those who love and care for them.

As Alzheimer’s disease symptoms worsen over time, it is important for patients and their caregivers to prepare for the eventual need to increase the amount of support as the disease progresses.

The novel learning-based framework aims to help pinpoint where patients are within the disease-development spectrum, to best predict the timing of potential later stages, to make it easier to plan for future care as the disease advances.

In a statement, Dajiang Zhu, associate Professor in computer science and engineering at UTA and lead-author, said: “For decades, a variety of predictive approaches have been proposed and evaluated in terms of the predictive capability for Alzheimer’s disease and its precursor, mild cognitive impairment.

“Many of these earlier prediction tools overlooked the continuous nature of how Alzheimer’s disease develops and the transition stages of the disease.”

Zhu, with Li Wang, UTA associate professor in mathematics, developed the new learning-based embedding framework that codes the various stages of Alzheimer’s disease development in a process they call a “disease-embedding tree,” or DETree.

Using this framework, the DETree can not only predict any of the five fine-grained clinical groups of Alzheimer’s disease development efficiently and accurately but can also provide more in-depth status information by projecting where within it the patient will be as the disease progresses, according to the researchers.

To test their DETree framework, researchers used data from 266 individuals with Alzheimer’s disease from the multicentre Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative. The DETree strategy results were compared with other widely used methods for predicting Alzheimer’s disease progression, and the experiment was repeated several times using machine learning-methods to validate the technique.

“We know individuals living with Alzheimer’s disease often develop worsening symptoms at very different rates,” Zhu said.

“We’re heartened that our new framework is more accurate than the other prediction models available, which we hope will help patients and their families better plan for the uncertainties of this complicated and devastating disease.”

Researchers also believe that the DETree framework has the potential to help predict the progression of other diseases that have multiple clinical stages of development, such as Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

The research, supported by over $2m in grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute on Aging and published in Pharmacological Research, can be read in full here.