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New research from Neuron discusses that people with early-stage Alzheimer's retain a form of memory capability. This has implications for rehabilitation and preservation of some memory function as the disease progresses.  This study suggests that older people with symptoms of early-stage Alzheimer's still showed capabilities of "implicit memory" (memory developed my repetition or priming) and that this is similar to young adults and older adults without symptoms. Researchers compared older adults without any Alzheimer's symptoms with older adults showing memory loss and other symptoms of early-stage Alzheimer's. They were asked to perform a classification test on words visually presented to them on a screen. The subjects were asked to classify the words as representing either living or nonliving subjects. Although the younger adults outperformed the older and Alzheimer's groups, all three showed a marked reduction in the time to do the classification with practice -- a characteristic of priming.
After doing an fMRI on these subjects, the researchers found that the brain area associated with such tasks -- the left prefrontal area of the cerebral cortex -- showed repetition-related reductions in activity as all of the subjects repeated the tasks. Such activity reductions are characteristic of learning with practice, in which the brain area reduces its activity as it adapts to a task. The researchers also found that this reduction in brain activity correlated with the reduction in the response time as subjects learned the task.
The authors proposed that this data can be used to find new ways to work with Alzheimer's patients. By building "implicit memory" through training, perhaps it can help to compensate for some of the loss of explicit memory for events and people that is profoundly affected by Alzheimer's. This study has shown that it is possible to tap into high-level cognitive areas that show preserved memory function.
Neuron June 2004
Howard Hughes Institute News Story
12:11:36 AM 
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