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Individuals with mild cognitive impairment, especially of the “amnestic subtype” (aMCI), are at increased risk for dementia due to Alzheimer’s disease relative to cognitively healthy older adults. Now, a study co-authored by researchers from MIT, Cornell University, and Massachusetts General Hospital has identified a key deficit in people with aMCI, which relates to producing complex language.
This deficit is independent of the memory deficit that characterizes this group and may provide an additional “cognitive biomarker” to aid in early detection — the time when treatments, as they continue to be developed, are likely to be most effective.
The researchers found that while individuals with aMCI could appreciate the basic structure of sentences (syntax) and their meaning (semantics), they struggled with processing certain ambiguous sentences in which pronouns alluded to people not referenced in the sentences themselves.
“These results are among the first to deal with complex syntax and really get at the abstract computation that’s involved in processing these linguistic structures,” says MIT linguistics scholar Suzanne Flynn, co-author of a paper detailing the results.
The focus on subtleties in language processing, in relation to aMCI and its potential transition to dementia such as Alzheimer’s disease is novel, the researchers say.
“Previous research has looked most often at single words and vocabulary,” says co-author Barbara Lust, a professor emerita at Cornell University. “We looked at a more complex level of language knowledge. When we process a sentence, we have to both grasp its syntax and construct a meaning. We found a breakdown at that higher level where you’re integrating form and meaning.”
The paper, “Disintegration at the syntax-semantics interface in prodromal Alzheimer’s disease: New evidence from complex sentence anaphora in amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment (aMCI),” appears in the Journal of Neurolinguistics.

The paper’s authors are Flynn, a professor in MIT’s Department of Linguistics and Philosophy; Lust, a professor emerita in the Department of Psychology at Cornell and a visiting scholar and research affiliate in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy; Janet Cohen Sherman, an associate professor of psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and director of the MGH Psychology Assessment Center; and, posthumously, the scholars James Gair and Charles Henderson of Cornell University.
Anaphora and ambiguity
To conduct the study, the scholars ran experiments comparing the cognitive performance of aMCI patients to cognitively healthy individuals in separate younger and older control groups. The research involved 61 aMCI patients of Massachusetts General Hospital, with control group research conducted at Cornell and MIT.
The study pinpointed how well people process and reproduce sentences involving “anaphora.” In linguistics terms, this generally refers to the relation between a word and another form in the sentence, such the use of “his” in the sentence, “The electrician repaired his equipment.” (The term “anaphora” has another related use in the field of rhetoric, involving the repetition of terms.)
In the study, the researchers ran a variety of sentence constructions past aMCI patients and the control groups. For instance, in the sentence, “The electrician fixed the light switch when he visited the tenant,” it is not actually clear if “he” refers to the electrician, or somebody else entirely. The “he” could be a family member, friend, or landlord, among other possibilities.
On the other hand, in the sentence, “He visited the tenant when the electrician repaired the light switch,” “he” and the electrician cannot be the same person. Alternately, in the sentence, “The babysitter emptied the bottle and prepared the formula,” there is no reference at all to a person beyond the sentence.

Ultimately, aMCI patients performed significantly worse than the control groups when producing sentences with “anaphoric coreference,” the ones with ambiguity about the identity of the person referred to via a pronoun.
“It’s not that aMCI patients have lost the ability to process syntax or put complex sentences together, or lost words; it’s that they’re showing a deficit when the mind has to figure out whether to stay in the sentence or go outside it, to figure out who we’re talking about,” Lust explains. “When they didn’t have to go outside the sentence for context, sentence production was preserved in the individuals with aMCI whom we studied.”
Flynn notes: “This adds to our understanding of the deterioration that occurs in early stages of the dementia process. Deficits extend beyond memory loss. While the participants we studied have memory deficits, their memory difficulties do not explain our language findings, as evidenced by a lack of correlation in their performance on the language task and their performances on measures of memory. This suggests that in addition to the memory difficulties that individuals with aMCI experience, they are also struggling with this central aspect of language.”
Looking for a path to treatment
The current paper is part of an ongoing series of studies that Flynn, Lust, Sherman, and their colleagues have performed. The findings have implications for potentially steering neuroscience studies toward regions of the brain that process language, when investigating MCI and other forms of dementia, such as primary progressive aphasia. The study may also help inform linguistics theory concerning various forms of anaphora.
Looking ahead, the scholars say they would like to increase the size of the studies as part of an effort to continue to define how it is that diseases progress and how language may be a predictor of that.
“Our data is a small population but very richly theoretically guided,” Lust says. “You need hypotheses that are linguistically informed to make advances in neurolinguistics. There’s so much interest in the years before Alzheimer’s disease is diagnosed, to see if it can be caught and its progression stopped.”
As Flynn adds, “The more precise we can become about the neuronal locus of deterioration, that’s going to make a big difference in terms of developing treatment.”
Support for the research was provided by the Cornell University Podell Award, Shamitha Somashekar and Apple Corporation, Federal Formula Funds, Brad Hyman at Massachusetts General Hospital, the Cornell Bronfenbrenner Center for Life Course Development, the Cornell Institute for Translational Research on Aging, the Cornell Institute for Social Science Research, and the Cornell Cognitive Science Program.

Spikes of fatalities linked to drinking that began with the Covid pandemic were not an anomaly. An estimated 178,000 people died in 2021 from similar causes.The Latest NewsAlcohol-related deaths surged in the United States by nearly 30 percent in recent years, with roughly 500 Americans dying each day in 2021, according to a new study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.The study chronicled a sustained spike in drinking during the Covid pandemic that continued to rise after the shock of the lockdowns of 2020. The incidence of alcohol-related deaths was higher in men, but among women the death rate shot up at a quicker pace.“I think the results of this research are really alarming,” said Dr. Michael Siegel, who is a professor of public health at Tufts University School of Medicine and was not involved in the study. “It shows that there’s been a truly substantial increase in alcohol-related deaths over the last six years.”Charly Triballeau/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images The study found that deaths linked to alcohol in the United States increased in five years by 40,000. The toll is stark: About 178,000 people died in 2021 from excessive drinking, compared with 138,000 in 2016. During that period, the deaths rose by 27 percent among men and 35 percent among women.Dr. Siegel attributed the surge possibly to people’s high stress levels during the pandemic alongside increased home-delivery services offered by the beverage industry. “Anytime you make something easier to acquire, you see an increase in use in response,” he said.What’s missing: The data are limited.Researchers concluded that their estimates of alcohol-related deaths were very conservative, because the data only included active drinkers. In addition, deaths from several diseases, including tuberculosis and H.I.V./AIDS, for which excessive drinking is a risk factor, were not tabulated. But researchers did count 58 associated causes, including some deaths directly related to bingeing, like alcohol dependence syndrome or poisoning, and other conditions less directly related, including breast cancer, heart disease and car crashes.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Federal health officials presented data hinting at a link to Guillain-Barré syndrome, but said the connection was still uncertain.Vaccines for respiratory syncytial virus may have caused a few cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare neurological condition, federal health officials said on Thursday.The numbers were small, on the order of two cases per 100,000 vaccinated people or fewer, and much more data is needed to pin down the risk, the officials said. In May 2023, the Food and Drug Administration approved two vaccines against R.S.V.: Abrysvo, by Pfizer, and Arexvy, by GSK.In June, rather than recommend the shots to all older adults, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that adults aged 60 or older might opt to receive a single dose of an R.S.V. vaccine in consultation with their health care providers. Fewer than 10 million doses had been administered by Feb. 16.The new safety data, disclosed at a meeting of scientific advisers to the agency, came from multiple databases maintained by federal health agencies. Still, because of the preliminary nature of the analysis, officials urged caution in interpreting the results.“At this point, due to the uncertainties and limitations, these early data cannot establish if there is an increased risk for G.B.S. after vaccination in this age group,” Dr. Thomas Shimabukuro, director of the C.D.C.’s Immunization Safety Office, said at a meeting on Thursday.Ongoing surveillance “will be better able to determine if an increased risk for G.B.S. after R.S.V. vaccination is present, and if so the magnitude of the risk,” he said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

A University of Kansas study of rare gene mutations that cause hereditary Alzheimer’s disease shows these mutations disrupt production of a small sticky protein called amyloid.
Plaques composed of amyloid are notoriously found in the brain in Alzheimer’s disease and have long been considered responsible for the inexorable loss of neurons and cognitive decline. Using a model species of worm called C. elegans that’s often used in labs to study diseases at the molecular level, the research team came to the surprising conclusion that the stalled process of amyloid production — not the amyloid itself — can trigger loss of critical connections between nerve cells.
The research, appearing in the journal Cell Reports, was headed by Michael Wolfe, Mathias P. Mertes Professor of Medicinal Chemistry at KU.
The research team focused on the rare inherited mutations because these mutations are found in genes that encode proteins that produce amyloid.
“If we can understand what’s happening in this inherited form of the disease where a single mutation can trigger it,” Wolfe said, “that might be a clue to what’s going on in all the other cases.”
The rare mutations are particularly devastating, as they fate the mutation carrier to Alzheimer’s disease in middle age, and children of a mutation carrier have a 50% chance of inheriting the disease-causing mutation.
Wolfe said hereditary Alzheimer’s disease shows the same pathology, the same presentation clinically and the same progression of symptoms as the “common, garden-variety” of Alzheimer’s related to old age.

“You see the same amyloid plaques in the hereditary disease,” he said. “We think that these inherited mutations, though rare, are key to what’s going on with all Alzheimer’s disease.”
Wolfe, who earned his doctorate at KU and returned to the university seven years ago for collaborative research opportunities, joined forces with Brian Ackley, associate professor of molecular biology at KU, whose lab specializes in research with the C. elegans model worm. The research team also included other KU collaborators as well as investigators in Beijing, China, and at Harvard Medical School.
Co-authors with KU’s Department of Medicinal Chemistry were Sujan Devkota, Vaishnavi Nagarajan, Arshad Noorani and Sanjay Bhattarai; co-authors at KU’s Department of Molecular Biosciences were Ackley and Yinglong Miao; and co-authors from KU’s Center for Computational Biology were Hung Do and Anita Saraf. Other KU co-authors were Caitlin Overmeyer of the Graduate Program in Neurosciences and Justin Douglas of KU’s Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Core Lab. The KU personnel collaborated with Rui Zhou of Tsinghua University in Beijing and Masato Maesako of Harvard Medical School.
Wolfe said the discovery could point the way toward new approaches to Alzheimer’s therapies, and he hoped fellow researchers and developers of drug therapies would pay close attention to his team’s results.
“Our findings suggest what’s needed is a stimulator of the amyloid-producing enzyme, to restart stalled processes and address both problems: eliminating stalled protein complexes that lead to degeneration of nerve cell connections and producing more soluble forms of amyloid. This approach could address both contributing factors simultaneously.”

Antibiotic-resistant infection is projected to catch up to cancer as the leading cause of death by 2050, making understanding and limiting the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria a priority worldwide.
In a paper published February 28 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a research team co-led by Michael S. Gilmore, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer at Mass Eye and Ear, describe the discovery of 18 never-before seen species of bacteria of the Enterococcus type that contain hundreds of new genes — findings that may offer new clues into antibiotic resistance as scientists hunt for ways to curb these infections.
Enterococci are leading causes of multidrug resistant infections, particularly following surgery and in hospitalized patients. The infections can be lethal and contribute to more than $30 billion annually in added health care costs.
“Over the past 75 years, antibiotics have saved hundreds of millions of lives and have contributed greatly to the success of all types of surgery,” said Gilmore, who also is director of the Infectious Disease Institute at Harvard Medical School. “Over the past 30 years, however, many of the most problematic bacteria have become increasingly resistant to antibiotics and this is now reaching crisis proportions. Our findings may improve understanding of how resistance genes spread to hospital bacteria and threaten human health.”
Discovered in the 1920’s, antibiotics like penicillin are compounds naturally produced by microbes in the soil. Gilmore notes that antibiotic producing microbes thrive in rotting leaves and plant matter on the forest floor and give forest soil its smell.
Gilmore and Ashlee Earl, PhD, director of the Bacterial Genomics Group at Broad, assembled an international team of scientists, including elite adventurers, to scour remote corners of the globe for scat, soil and other samples that would likely contain bacteria of the Enterococcus type. The diversity of specimens they collected spanned samples from penguins migrating through sub-Antarctic waters, duiker and elephants from Uganda; insects, bivalves, sea turtles, and wild turkeys from Brazil to the United States; kestrel and vultures from Mongolia; wallaby, swans, and wombats from Australia; and zoo animals and wild birds from Europe.
The team’s collection efforts had previously led to the discovery of new classes of bacterial toxins and showed that Enterococcus bacteria arose about 425 million years ago when the first animals, ancestors of millipedes and worms, came onto land. They likely dominated the planet for about 50 million years before four-legged animals came ashore.

Their most recent collections expanded genus diversity of enterococcal strains by more than 25 percent and in doing so, uncovered more clues, revealing that insects and other invertebrates are likely by far the greatest natural source for enterococci bacteria, including species that are naturally antibiotic resistant.
“Until recently, most of what we’ve understood about the genetics of enterococcus come from those that make us sick, and that’s a problem — like trying to understand darkness without ever seeing the light,” said Earl. “Expanding our view to include those from outside of hospitals, with the help of citizen scientists, gave us the contrast we needed to identify how they make people sick in the hospital, and also gives the public the chance to co-own solutions.”
Gilmore posits that insects have been eating the rotting plant material, and naturally giving themselves a dose of the antibiotics in the process. He hypothesizes that for hundreds of millions of years, bacteria in the guts of these insects like Enterococcus have been exposed to those antibiotics and have become resistant. In the 1940’s and ’50’s, when humans first began taking antibiotics, the resistances were already in the environment and worked their way into the bacteria that cause human infection.
“The COVID-19 pandemic revealed that nature contains many infectious risks for humans,” said Gilmore. “This study shows that insects and their relatives in nature are a large and uncharacterized reservoir of undiscovered genes in microbes closely related to those that cause some of the most antibiotic resistant infections.”
Authorship: Julia A. Schwartzman, Francois Lebreton, Rauf Salamzade, Terrance Shea, Melissa J. Martin, Katharina Schaufler, Aysun Urhane, Thomas Abeel, Ilana L.B.C Camargo , Bruna F. Sgardiol, Janira Prichula, Ana Paula Guedes Frazzon, Gonzalo Giribet, Daria Van Tyne , Gregg Treinish, Charles J. Innis, Jaap A. Wagenaar, Ryan M. Whipple Abigail L. Manson, Ashlee M. Earl, and Michael S. Gilmore.
Disclosures: The authors declared no competing interests.
Funding: This project was supported by the Harvard-wide Program on Antibiotic Resistance, NIH/NIAID grant AI083214 and U19AI110818 to the Broad Institute. Portions of the work were supported by a Research Sabbatical grant to Gilmore from Research to Prevent Blindness to explore the origins of antibiotic resistance. Schwartzman was supported by the NIH Ruth Kirschstein fellowship F32GM121005.
Paper cited: Schwartzman, JA et al. “Global diversity of enterococci and description of 18 novel species” PNAS DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2310852121

Keratin microsphere gel, consisting of keratin-based microspheres that swell in water to form a gel, has shown efficacy in promoting hair follicle growth in murine models. Its potential application as an active ingredient in hair regrowth treatments with minimal side effects is anticipated.
The skin serves as a barrier that restricts the penetration of particles and protects against exogenous threats. Recent research indicates that small particles containing hair growth-promoting substances can traverse this barrier to reach the hair follicles. A study conducted by the University of Tsukuba demonstrated that topical application of a gel composed of water-soluble oxidized keratin (keratin microsphere gel) on mice significantly enhanced cell proliferation and the expression of genes associated with hair growth in the papilla cells of hair follicles, thereby stimulating hair development.
When water-based keratin microsphere gel was applied to the shaved backs of mice, hair regrowth commenced on the second day post-application, with the rate of growth subsequently accelerating. This effect was similar to that of minoxidil, a renowned hair growth stimulant. Moreover, genetic analysis of the dorsal skin tissue samples in mice revealed a marked upregulation in the expression of genes involved in hair cycle regulation and skin homeostasis. In addition, a skin model was developed featuring a co-culture of a human-origin epidermal model on the upper layer and primary human papilla cells beneath, where the stimulatory impact of keratin microspheres on papilla cells was validated through gene expression analysis, demonstrating the gel’s permeability via skin.
These findings represent the first evidence of the hair growth-promoting properties of keratin microsphere gel. Given that keratin is a primary constituent of hair and skin, its application as a hair growth agent is assumed to be safe and effective, with negligible adverse effects.
This study was funded by JST SCORE program (JPMJST2052).

Pulse oximeters — one of the most common medical devices used in global healthcare — can provide significantly overestimated oxygen saturation readings in people with darker skin tones, according to the most comprehensive study ever to explore the issue.
Published in the British Journal of Anaesthesia, the new study is based on a systematic review of previous research into the use of the devices, and examined 44 studies dating from the mid-1970s to the present day.
In the course of that, researchers assessed more than 733,000 oxygen saturation readings taken from over 222,000 people — including almost 70,000 people of non-white ethnicity.
They found most of the studies revealed evidence of the devices being inclined to overestimate readings in participants with darker skin tones.
While the researchers say it is challenging — based on the current available data — to state the magnitude of those overestimates, they insist it could create a number of issues for both patients and medical professionals.
It could, for example, result in patients not being able to see a doctor as — based on the readings generated by the pulse oximeter — they are deemed to be healthy.
And with studies suggesting the errors are exacerbated at lower levels of oxygen saturation, it could result in patients with critical oxygen levels not receiving treatment which they urgently need.

The new study involved experts in intensive care medicine, dermatology and paediatric care from a number of leading universities and hospitals around the UK.
Professor Daniel Martin OBE, Professor of Perioperative and Intensive Care Medicine in the University of Plymouth and a consultant at the University Hospitals Plymouth NHS Trust (UHP), is the study’s lead author.
He said: “As clinicians, we rely on accurate data to make informed clinical decisions. But during the COVID pandemic, and to some extent since, it was necessary to put thresholds in place which meant that people were only admitted to hospital if their levels fell to a certain point. If those levels are being overestimated — so, for example, if a device is telling someone their oxygen saturation is 98% whereas it is in fact significantly lower — it could realistically mean people are missing out on treatments they need.”
When pulse oximeters were introduced around 50 years ago, they were intended solely for use in hospitals and a handful of other healthcare settings.
Today, they are used in everything from GP surgeries to outpatient departments, emergency rooms and intensive care units all over the world, where they are used to monitor the health of people which virtually every form of medical condition.
Crucially, they are also available for the public to purchase in shops, pharmacies and online and many are encouraged to take regular measurements of their oxygen saturation levels in the course of managing a range of health conditions.

Professor Martin said: “If people are admitted to hospital, there are other safety mechanisms to help identify unwell patients. Blood tests to measure oxygen levels, for example, will not be impacted in any way by a person’s skin tone and a medical appointment will allow a doctor or nurse to carry out a physical assessment as well as other types of monitoring. The concern is that there may be people in the community relying on pulse oximeter readings to signify a deterioration in their health, where these additional tests are unavailable.”
Study co-author Professor Eugene Healy, Professor of Dermatology at the University of Southampton and honorary consultant in University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust, said: “This systematic review highlights the need for clinicians to take account of a person’s skin tone as part of the clinical decision-making process when using pulse oximeters to estimate oxygen levels.”
The findings revealed through the systematic review are already being explored in much greater detail through the EXAKT study, funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) and also being led by Professor Martin.
It is currently in the process of recruiting around 900 critically ill patients with different skin tones from 24 sites around the UK to investigate the accuracy of specific pulse oximeters used in hospitals across the UK today.

People at risk of Alzheimer’s disease have impaired spatial navigation prior to problems with other cognitive functions, including memory, finds a new study led by UCL researchers.
The research, published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association, used virtual reality to test the spatial navigation of 100 asymptomatic midlife adults, aged 43-66, from the PREVENT-Dementia prospective cohort study.
Participants had a hereditary or physiological risk of Alzheimer’s disease, due to either a gene (the APOE-ε4 allele) that puts them at risk of the condition, a family history of Alzheimer’s disease, or lifestyle risk factors such as low levels of physical activity. Crucially, these participants were around 25 years younger than their estimated age of dementia onset.
Led by Professor Dennis Chan, the study used a test designed by Dr Andrea Castegnaro and Professor Neil Burgess (all UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience), in which participants were asked to navigate within a virtual environment while wearing VR headsets.
The researchers found that people at greater risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, regardless of risk factor, were selectively impaired on the VR navigation task, without a corresponding impairment on other cognitive tests. The authors say their findings suggest that impairments in spatial navigation may begin to develop years, or even decades, before the onset of any other symptoms.
First author, Dr Coco Newton (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience), who carried out the work while at University of Cambridge said: “Our results indicated that this type of navigation behaviour change might represent the very earliest diagnostic signal in the Alzheimer’s disease continuum — when people move from being unimpaired to showing manifestation of the disease.”
The researchers also found that there was a strong gender difference in how participants performed, with the impairment being observed in men and not women.

Dr Newton added: “We are now taking these findings forward to develop a diagnostic clinical decision support tool for the NHS in the coming years, which is a completely new way of approaching diagnostics and will hopefully help people to get a more timely and accurate diagnosis.
“This is particularly important with the emergence of anti-amyloid treatments for Alzheimer’s, which are considered to be most effective in the earliest stages of the disease.
“It also highlights the need for further study of the differing vulnerability of men and women to Alzheimer’s disease and the importance of taking gender into account for both diagnosis and future treatment.”
Professor Chan said: “We are excited by these findings for two main reasons. First, they improve detection of the clinical onset of Alzheimer’s disease, critical for prompt application of treatments.
“Second, the VR navigation test is based on our knowledge of the spatial properties of cells in the brain’s temporal lobe, and the application of cellular neuroscience to clinical populations helps bridge the gap in understanding how disease at the neuronal level can result in the clinical manifestation of disease. This knowledge gap currently represents one of the biggest barriers to progress in Alzheimer’s research.”
The research was carried out in collaboration with the University of Cambridge, jointly funded by the Alzheimer’s Society and an MSD research grant.

Dr Richard Oakley, Associate Director of Research and Innovation at Alzheimer’s Society, said: “One in three people born today will go on to develop dementia, and early and accurate diagnosis of the diseases that cause the condition are vital for people to access the right support, plan for the future, and receive appropriate treatment.
“Very early symptoms of dementia can be subtle and difficult to detect, but problems with navigation are thought to be some of the first changes in Alzheimer’s disease.
“This study was part funded by Alzheimer’s Society and used virtual reality technology showing that a healthy person’s navigation abilities are linked to their dementia risk, based on genetic and environmental factors.
“This innovative technology is a long way from becoming a diagnostic test, but it does provide more evidence about the role of navigational abilities as an early sign of Alzheimer’s disease. More work is needed to develop this technology, but it will be exciting to see how this research may offer a way to spot disease-specific changes early and help people living with dementia in future.”

An estimated 4 to 8 million older adults with mild cognitive impairment are currently driving in the United States, and one-third of them will develop dementia within five years. Individuals with progressive dementias are eventually unable to drive safely, yet many remain unaware of their cognitive decline.
Currently, screening and evaluation services for driving can only test a small number of individuals with cognitive concerns, missing many who need to know if they require treatment.
Nursing, engineering and neuropsychology researchers at Florida Atlantic University are testing and evaluating a readily and rapidly available, unobtrusive in-vehicle sensing system they have developed. This technology could provide the first step toward future widespread, low-cost early warnings of cognitive change for this large number of older drivers in the U.S. and elsewhere.
In their study, published in the journal BMC Geriatrics, they are systematically examining how this system could detect anomalous driving behavior indicative of cognitive impairment. Few studies have reported on the use of continuous, unobtrusive sensors and related monitoring devices for detecting subtle variability in the performance of highly complex everyday activities over time. This significant proportion of older drivers constitutes a previously unexplored opportunity to detect cognitive decline.
“The neuropathologies of Alzheimer’s disease have been found in the brains of older drivers killed in motor vehicle accidents who did not even know they had the disease and had no apparent signs of it,” said Ruth Tappen, Ed.D., principal investigator, senior author and the Christine E. Lynn Eminent Scholar and Professor, FAU Christine E. Lynn College of Nursing. “The purpose of our study arose from the importance of identifying cognitive dysfunction as early and efficiently as possible. Sensor systems installed in older drivers’ vehicles may detect these changes and could generate early warnings of possible changes in cognition.”
The study uses a naturalistic longitudinal design to obtain continuous information on driving behavior that is being compared with the results of extensive cognitive testing conducted every three months for three years. A driver facing camera, forward facing camera, and telematics unit are installed in the vehicle and data is downloaded every three months when the cognitive tests are administered.
Researchers are gauging abnormal driving such as getting lost, ignoring traffic signals and signs, near-collision events, distraction and drowsiness, reaction time and braking patterns. They also are looking at travel patterns such as number of trips, miles driven, miles on the highway, miles during the night and daytime, and driving in severe weather.

The in-vehicle sensor network developed by FAU researchers in the College of Engineering and Computer Science, uses open-source hardware and software components to reduce the time, risks and costs associated with developing in-vehicle sensing units. In-vehicle sensor systems are kept simple and compact by minimizing complex wiring, limiting the size of the sensing units, and limiting the number of sensors in a vehicle to support the unobtrusiveness of in-vehicle sensors. Each in-vehicle sensor system is comprised of two distributed sensing units: one for telematics data and the other for video data.
Inertial measurement unit data is processed to determine hard braking, hard accelerations and hard turns and GPS data. It also includes a timestamp, latitude, longitude, altitude, course over ground and the number of communicating satellites.
The video unit has built-in artificial intelligence functions that analyze video in real-time. The driver-facing camera is mounted in the left corner of the windshield and is directed to the driver’s face to analyze his/her behavior and facial expressions. The forward-facing camera is mounted under the rearview mirror and is used to record events external to the vehicle.
Driver-facing indices include face detection, eye detection (open or closed), yawning, distraction, smoking and mobile phone use. Behavior indices include traffic sign detection (running a red light), object detection (pedestrian, cyclists, curbs, barriers or nearby vehicles), lane crossing, near-collision and pedestrian detection.
“These travel-pattern-related driver behavior indices are known to be indicative of the changes in older drivers’ cognition and physical functions since they tend to incorporate deliberate avoidance strategies to compensate for age-related deficits,” said Tappen. “Driver behavior indices are evaluated for each driver and are summarized on a daily, weekly and monthly basis and are classified into four categories.”
A total of 460 study participants will be recruited from Broward and Palm Beach counties in Southeast Florida and are classified into three diagnostic groups: mild cognitive impairment, early dementia and unimpaired (normal). The Louis and Anne Green Memory and Wellness Center operated by FAU’s College of Nursing serves as the testing site for a clinical battery including assessments of cognition, functioning in daily activities and mood (depression), and an additional set of tests including executive function and attention.
“The innovation of our research project lies in the unobtrusive, rapidly and readily available in-vehicle sensing and monitoring system built upon modern open-source hardware and software using existing techniques to develop and customize the components and configure them for this new purpose,” said Tappen.
The study is supported by a grant from the National Institute on Aging, National Institutes of Health (1R01AG068472) awarded to Tappen.

The latest Canada’s Food Guide presents a paradigm shift in nutrition advice, nixing traditional food groups, including meat and dairy, and stressing the importance of plant-based proteins. Yet, the full implications of replacing animal with plant protein foods in Canadians’ diets are unknown.
New research at McGill University in collaboration with the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine provides compelling evidence that partially substituting animal with plant protein foods can increase life expectancy and decrease greenhouse gas emissions. Importantly, it also suggests that benefits depend on the type of animal protein being replaced.
The study, published in Nature Food, drew data from a national nutrition survey to analyze Canadians’ dietary records. The study modeled partial replacements (25% and 50%) of either red and processed meat or dairy with plant protein foods like nuts, seeds, legumes, tofu, and fortified soy beverages, on a combination of nutrition, health, and climate outcomes.
Small dietary changes, big impact on carbon footprint
Red and processed meat and dairy are the primary contributors to Canada’s diet-related greenhouse gas emissions, as evidenced in a previous study. Remarkably, this study found a person’s diet-related carbon footprint plummets by 25% when they replace half of their intake of red and processed meats with plant protein foods. On the other hand, dairy substitutions showed smaller reductions of up to 5%.
“We show that co-benefits for human and planetary health do not necessarily require wholesale changes to diets, such as adopting restrictive dietary patterns or excluding certain food groups altogether but can be achieved by making simple partial substitutions of red and processed meat, in particular, with plant protein foods,” explains Olivia Auclair, first author and recent PhD graduate in McGill’s Department of Animal Science.
Sex gap in plant-based health benefits
Diets high in animal products are known to increase the risk of heart disease, diabetes, and certain cancers. In this study, researchers estimated that if half of the red and processed meat in a person’s diet was replaced with plant protein foods, they could live on average, nearly nine months longer, stemming from a reduced risk of chronic disease.

When broken down by sex, males stand to gain more by making the switch, with the gain in life expectancy doubling that for females. In contrast, partially replacing dairy with plant protein foods led to smaller gains in life expectancy and was accompanied by a trade-off: an increased calcium inadequacy by up to 14%.
“I hope our findings will help consumers make healthier and more sustainable food choices and inform future food policy in Canada,” says senior author Sergio Burgos, Associate Professor in McGill’s Department of Animal Science and scientist at the Research Institute of McGill University Health Centre.
As more people seek sustainable and health-conscious diets, the study’s findings serve as a guide, empowering individuals to make informed choices that benefit both personal well-being and the planet.
“Increasing the consumption of plant-based foods alongside reductions in red and processed meat would have considerable benefits for health and the environment and would involve relatively small changes in diets for most people in Canada,”says Patricia Eustachio Colombo, co-author and Honorary Research Fellow at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine’s Centre on Climate Change & Planetary Health.
About the study
“Partial substitutions of animal with plant protein foods in Canadian diets have synergies and trade-offs among nutrition, health and climate outcomes” by O. Auclair et al. was published in Nature Food.