New data mining strategy spots those at high risk of Alzheimer's
To blame are the many undefined subtypes of mild cognitive impairment, a precursor to Alzheimer's disease. "Everyone thinks Alzheimer's is one disease, but it's not," said P. Murali Doraiswamy, M.D., professor of psychiatry and director of the neurocognitive disorders program at Duke Health. "There are many subgroups. If you enroll all different types of people in a trial, but your drug is targeting only one biological pathway, of course the people who don't have that abnormality are not going to respond to the drug, and the trial is going to fail." But if scientists grouped people with similar types of cognitive impairment, they could more precisely test the impact of investigational drugs, according to findings in a July 28 article in the journal Scientific Reports , a publication of Nature Research. The research was jointly led by Dragan Gamberger, Ph.D., an artificial intelligence expert at the Rudjer Boskovic Institute in Croatia and Do...