New technology pre-screens for dementia/post-concussion syndrome
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Narrator: With the baby boomer population hitting the age of retirement, more and more families will have to deal with a parent of loved suffering with dementia. Often, in the early stages, diagnosing dementia can be a long, stressful process with multiple visits to a family physician. Now, a Canadian company has developed software that pre-screens for dementia and ‘demedicalizes’ the process. Scott Knight, Executive Director of the Hemisphere Centre for Mental Health and Wellness explains.
Scott Knight: Brainscreen is a technology application developed by Hemisphere Centre for Mental Health and Wellness. It came about as a result of a burgeoning aging population and the need to pre-screen for dementia. It also has capabilities for post-concussion syndrome, which is a timely topic in the news now. We set about a year ago creating this software, because right now to screen for dementia it requires basically a trip to your family doctor, which can cause some difficulties with the family dynamic and even with the family doctor, and try to ‘demedicalize’ the process.
By creating a scientifically normed application that can be taken online and administered by anybody, we can give a quick snap shot of where they are with cognitive impairments. The other aspect of it is results can be sent not only to the individual doing the test, but to corporations, industry, government who want to track and keep data bases on this.
Typically there is very little done in the family doctor or GP world on a regular basis to screen. What I see in my normal course of business in clinical notes and records, typically it’s a two minute discussion, “Are you forgetting anything . . . There are pencil/paper tests that you can administer that is getting more online, but I think Brainscreen is taking it to the next step actually tracking and creating the data base sending those results to the various interested parties.
Narrator: Because post-concussion syndrome and dementia share similar traits, Brainscreen has sports applications as well.
Scott Knight: The technology also resides on portable computing devices so it can be on the sidelines or on the bench being administered. Actually, administering the test during the course of a game it actually allows for what we like to say, ‘time out’. But even if they don’t have a concussion if they’ve been rattled hard enough that the wind’s been knocked out of them, it gives them a chance to recuperate. In the event they do have a concussion you can make an informed decision whether they go back in the game or not.
There is s study that just came out that showed through functional MRI, the different brain activity that occurs pre-season, during the season, and post-season. And what it showed in teenagers at least is there is significant brain activity in pre and post-season, but during the actual football season brain activity actually slowed right down. Some of these teenage football players were getting hit 500 to 800 times during the course of a season and linesmen were actually taking a 1000 hits.
So they’re actually doing a study now to see how many hits these people can absorb and should they be absorbing, so that’s another area we’re looking at.
The cumulative effects over the span of a lifetime of blows that we all take to the head, whether it be rattling the brain in a whiplash type situation or actual degeneration of actual brain activity, there’ s very little cumulative research in that area. This is also to ‘demedicalize’ the process by administering Brainscreen, putting it out there that people have a tool they can access.
