The company’s study included 74 participants with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease who received either Cognito stimulation or a sham device that acted as a placebo. Subjects were asked to use the headset for one hour every day for six months.
Compared to the placebo group, patients with Cognito stimulation experienced 77 percent slower functional decline, as measured by a scale that assesses how well Alzheimer’s disease patients perform daily activities such as eating, dressing, and moving. It was shown that
The treatment group also showed 76 percent slower cognitive impairment compared to the placebo, as measured by tests assessing orientation, memory, attention, language, and writing skills.
Interestingly, there was a 69 percent reduction in brain atrophy, or shrinkage, in the treatment group compared to the sham group, as measured by MRI. In Alzheimer’s disease, parts of the brain may begin to shrink when connections between networks of neurons are disrupted.
“Doing this for an hour a day produced lasting biological changes,” Kahn says. He likens wearing the device once a day to exercising regularly, and in a way, training your brain. The downside is that you have to stay still while wearing the device, and you can’t fall asleep. In a Cognito study, 85% of participants were able to use the device consistently.
Cognito’s approach is based on the work of MIT neuroscientist Li-Huei Tsai. He co-founded the company with fellow MIT professor Ed Boyden. Previously, when they stimulated mice with 40 hertz light and sound, Improves memory task performance and also reduces amyloid levels—A protein that accumulates and forms plaques in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients.a new paper in a diary Nature Tsai, Boyden, and colleagues explain that they may do this by activating waste disposal mechanisms in the mouse brain.
Amyloid accumulation has long been a leading theory to explain Alzheimer’s disease. However, in the Cognito trial, researchers found no reduction in amyloid plaques in participants’ brain scans. However, the Cognito trial used a type of brain imaging called positron emission tomography (PET) that detects dense amyloid plaques. In the MIT team’s new study, Tsai and his colleagues found that stimulation appears to remove a more diffuse type of amyloid that spreads throughout the brain and is not detected by PET scans. She said it’s possible that the stimulation in the Cognito trial had an effect on this type of amyloid, but the company’s current study wasn’t designed to measure that.
Christopher Weber, director of the Chicago-based Alzheimer’s Association’s global science initiative, said he was encouraged by the safety of the Cognito device but said the study was too small to adequately test its effectiveness. Ta.
“Research in this area is still in its infancy, and to fully understand the relationship between gamma wave activity and Alzheimer’s disease, and in particular whether restoring or enhancing gamma wave activity would have a therapeutic effect, larger and more diverse studies are needed. Further studies with cohorts are needed,” says Professor Weber. .
