Three-Minute Take-Home Test May Identify Symptoms Linked to Alzheimer's Disease
27 comments
·September 19, 2025pedalpete
Workaccount2
Was really interested in this until I saw it was another static hardware product with a subscription as if it were a service.
If the toilet was invented today, plumbers would all be telling us how $1/shit is a steal.
codebje
Here I sit, broken-hearted...
DaveZale
yes, poor sleep quality leads to bad days, bad days lead to more bad sleep, it is a downward spiral and may impact many of us in our prime years, too.
All the best on your research and funding. Quality sleep has been undervalued, especially among work cultures that value overachieving at the expense of personal health.
pedalpete
Thanks. A researcher we work with has postulated that build-up of metabolic waste (amyloid and tau, among others) directly impairs the glymphatic system, leading to more build-up. A viscous cycle.
I don't think she's the first to postulate this, but I believe she is researching this relationship now.
Though work culture is an important one, we're somewhat more focused on the less self-imposed sleep challenges related to maternity and perimenopause/menopause.
DaveZale
that's a cute Freudian slip (or deliberate joke) - viscous cycle - sure, amyloid and tau are probably very viscous when you poke at them with the laboratory utensil of your choice. And accumulation of them is like a viscious cycle of plaque accumulation and even worse clearance. It seems exponetial
tootie
I have narcolepsy and it's hard to describe what an absolute fog I was in for years before diagnosis. The current best treatment is a powerful depressant taken at bed time and again middle of the night to induce deep sleep.
pedalpete
Is that gabapentin? Or is there something else that is the go to these days?
There was a comment on reddit a few days ago from someone with narcolepsy who was looking for a sleep tracker.
Sadly, our technology does not "induce" deep sleep.
It is suspected that the reason the Alzheimer's study showed such an increase in deep sleep was due to decreased cortisol as a result of stimulation, but that is just a theory at this point.
Studies do show a decrease in night-time cortisol (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-017-02170-3) early in the night during stimulation.
Citizen8396
What do you do with user data?
pedalpete
We don’t sell or share EEG data with third parties. The data is encrypted on the device and in storage. Our system processes it to show the user how they respond to stimulation, but company staff do not have direct access to individual user data. Internally we only look at anonymized or aggregated data to improve the technology.
Is that what you meant? I assumed you meant from a privacy perspective.
octaane
Are you planning on allowing this device to work with Android? I'm asking because I can see on your website that it requires an iphone currently.
tptacek
The standard statistical caution for these kinds of screening tests is especially important here, because while Alzheimers drugs may be more effective earlier in the disease course, none of them are "effective" in the sense of meaningfully staving the disease off; the upside to early detection is not very strong.
Meanwhile: the big challenge for screening tests is base rate confounding: the test needs to be drastically more specific the lower the percentage of the cohort that truly has the condition is. Relatively low rates of false positives can pile up quickly against true positives for conditions that are rare in the population.
The bad thing here is: you get a test suggestive of early-onset Alzheimers. It could realistically be the case that the test positive indicates in reality a coin-flip chance you have it. But that doesn't matter, because it will take years for the diagnosis to settle, and your mental health is materially injured in the meantime.
DavidSJ
while Alzheimers drugs may be more effective earlier in the disease course, none of them are "effective" in the sense of meaningfully staving the disease off; the upside to early detection is not very strong.
One correction here: the amyloid antibodies that successfully clear out a large amount of plaque have yet to report data from intervention trials prior to symptom onset, so we can’t say this with confidence and in fact we have good reason to suspect they would be more effective at this disease stage.
I wrote about this and related topics here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-defense-of-the-amyloid-h...
Edited to add: the sort of test discussed in the OP wouldn’t be relevant to presymptomatic treatment, however, since it’s a test of symptoms rather than biomarkers for preclinical disease.
pedalpete
That is an amazing breakdown of AD, and I think it will be my go-to for sharing in the future.
Have you seen the research in phase-targeted auditory stimulation, memory, amyloid, and sleep? Do you have thoughts on that?
Acoustic stimulation during sleep predicts long-lasting increases in memory performance and beneficial amyloid response in older adults - https://doi.org/10.1093/ageing/afad228
Acoustic Stimulation to Improve Slow-Wave Sleep in Alzheimer's Disease: A Multiple Night At-Home Intervention https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jagp.2024.07.002
DavidSJ
Thank you for your kind words.
I hadn’t seen that research, thanks for passing it along. It seems like an interesting approach to improve slow wave sleep, which is known to help with amyloid clearance.
hollerith
Your first sentence seems to imply that an effective intervention or treatment for AD would need to be a drug.
dr_dshiv
Exercise significant skepticism with neuroscience. People are credulous — and many studies are honestly shams. Like that “MIT study shows that ChatGPT reduces brain activity.”
Why is this pilot study in the Smithsonian?
pedalpete
I tend to agree with you, and many sleep studies are even worse. I work in the space.
I believe replication is key.
It was amazing when the room temperature superconductor paper came out about 18 months ago, the immediate response was to share the news, and then replicate.
macintux
In fairness, as I understand it room temperature superconducting would change everything. Small wonder people were excited.
mcswell
I am not understanding this: "It can’t directly predict who will develop Alzheimer’s, but it does identify who could be at a higher risk." I get the part that it can't "directly predict", but what does it mean to "identify who could be at a higher risk"? How was "higher risk" independently diagnosed in the study in order to show a correlation between higher risk according to this test, and higher risk according to some other test?
dmbche
"Patients with amnestic MCI—who have memory loss as their main symptom and are more likely to develop Alzheimer’s compared to people with non-amnestic MCI—had lower responses to the test, reports the Guardian’s Ian Sample. It can’t directly predict who will develop Alzheimer’s, but it does identify who could be at a higher risk."
It's correlated eith amnestic MCI, ehich itself correlated with higher risk of alzheimers(edit0:typo) (that's what I'm reading from the begining of the paragraph you quoted)
kingofmen
> may identify
> linked to
Really putting their necks on the chopping block and making with the bold opinions, here.
There is a growing body of research showing that increasing slow-wave activity during sleep can improve outcomes, including sleep quality[1], memory, and correlations with amyloid response[2].
Sadly, our latest grant application did not receive funding, but we are supporting other clinical researchers with our technology. Our technology is based on more than a decade of research with 50+ published, peer reviewed studies.
We focus on sleep directly rather than the disease, which means people do not have to wait years for regulatory approvals before they can feel day-to-day benefits.
For those curious about learning more, our approach and links to additional research are on our website https://affectablesleep.com .
Mild-to-moderate Alzheimer’s changes in sleep https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jagp.2024.07.002
Slow-wave activity, memory, and amyloid response https://doi.org/10.1093/ageing/afad228