The eyes can reveal a lot about the health of our brain. In fact, eye problems can be one of the first signs of cognitive decline. A study shows that loss of visual sensitivity can predict dementia 12 years before it is diagnosed.
In research carried out by Loughborough University, United Kingdom, 8,623 healthy people were followed for several years. At the end of the study, 537 participants had developed dementia, giving researchers the chance to determine what factors might predict the diagnosis.
At the beginning of the study, participants were asked to do a visual test – they had to press a button as soon as they saw a triangle forming from moving dots. People who would later develop dementia took much longer to notice this triangle on the screen than people who never developed the disease.
Problems associated with vision may be an early indicator of cognitive declinesince toxic amyloid plaques associated with Alzheimer’s disease may first affect areas of the brain associated with vision, damaging parts of the brain associated with memory as the disease progresses.
Like this, vision tests may find deficits before memory testsscientists reveal in the recent study.
Difficulty registering and remembering faces
The research team also says there is evidence that people with dementia process the faces of people they have just met in an ineffective way. In other words, they don’t follow the normal pattern of looking around and examining the face of the person they’re talking to.
In healthy people, this is what happens – a thorough examination from the eyes to the nose and mouth of the interlocutor. We do this to register the face in our brain to remember it later.
There are those who can understand that the person they are talking to doesn’t do that. In fact, some doctors who work with people with dementia recognize right away that someone has the disease, as people with dementia can sometimes appear lost because they do not move their eyes to scan their surroundings, including the faces of people who have just had it. to know.
This is why, later on, people with dementia have more difficulty recognizing faces. Thus, this initial problem of not “recording” the face of the person you just metIt may be related to ineffective eye movement rather than being a pure memory disorder.
Can eye movement improve memory?
Some studies have found that eye movement can improve memory, which may explain why people who read more or watch more television have better memory and a lower risk of dementia than those who don’t.
While watching television or reading, our eyes move back and forth across the page and screen. However, people who read frequently also tend to be those who have had more education, which provides brain capacity so that when brain connections are damaged, the negative outcome is less.
Other studies have found that left-to-right and right-to-left eye movements done quickly (two eye movements per second) improve autobiographical memory (your life story). Some studies suggest that this beneficial effect of eye movement only benefits right-handed people, but there are no explanations for this.
Despite these exciting findings, treatment for memory problems using deliberate eye movements in older people has not yet been developed. Furthermore, using eye movement deficits as a diagnostic tool for early-stage Alzheimer’s disease is not yet common.
