Why getting lost could be an early red flag for Alzheimer’s

Getting lost in a place you’re familiar with may be one of the first signs you could develop Alzheimer’s disease later in life, a new, long-term study has found.

The Prevent project, which is funded by the Alzheimer’s Society and based at Edinburgh University, is studying two groups, The Guardian reported; one group consists of people aged 41 to 59 with close relatives who have Alzheimer’s and are thought to be high risk of doing the same, and a second group of people with no family connection to Alzheimer’s.

The study aims to identify signs of the disease in younger people. At present, it’s more often identified when people are in their 60s and it has had time to already cause damage to their brains.

The Guardian reported that the study found that the higher risk group were worse at tests that measured “ability to visualise their position”.

“They also tended to have a small hippocampus, a region of the brain involved in navigation,” the newspaper reported. It cited one woman who is in the high risk group, who recalled that her own mother, who now has Alzheimer’s, was unable to find her car in car parks even at a relatively young age.

“As children, we spent our lives hunting through car parks trying to find where she had left it,” she recalls.

In the movie Still Alice, professor Alice Howland, played by Julianne Moore, first starts to worry that she has Alzheimer’s when she gets lost while running on her usual track on campus. Still Alice was based on a best-selling novel by Lisa Genova.

But The Guardian noted that it was not yet clear how effective measuring navigational skills would be in predicting who will later develop Alzheimer’s. 

What do you think about these findings?