Could VCU researchers help detect Lewy body dementia faster?

By Jeffrey Kelley

Creating a biomarker to identify characteristics of Lewy body dementia (LBD) could get patients the treatment they need faster — and improve their quality of life for longer.

To support earlier and accurate diagnosis of LBD, a team led by the Parkinson’s and Movement Disorders Center’s Matthew Barrett, M.D., is developing a physiological biomarker that could identify LBD’s distinct cognitive fluctuations. Such spontaneous periods of impaired attention and reduced arousal in people are signature signs of the disease. 

LBD is the second most common cause of dementia, associated with unrelenting cognitive decline, profound caregiver burden, and higher healthcare costs compared to Alzheimer’s disease.

Despite its prevalence and worse prognosis among other causes of dementia, LBD patients suffer from misdiagnosis and delayed diagnosis. It can result in use of medications with increased morbidity and delays in appropriate clinical care. “Accurate and early diagnosis is a serious unmet need,” says Barrett, an associate professor of neurology.

His work has been backed by a grant from the National Institutes of Health, which has a goal of creating such a biomarker to more quickly detect LBD.

Barrett’s work centers on the use of electroencephalography (EEG), which measures electrical activity in the brain, to correlate signs of cognitive fluctuations to patients with possible LBD. For their research, they’ll compare EEG scans of patients with LBD, Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease, as well as those in healthy patients as a control.

“We anticipate the result is a clinically relevant physiological biomarker of clinical fluctuations in LBD patients that can be validated in a large-scale multi-center study,” Barrett says. And the fact that EEG is non-invasive, relatively inexpensive, and widely available will support its adoption as a biomarker. 

“The ability to diagnose LBD accurately and at an early stage will alleviate diagnostic uncertainty for patients and caregivers, facilitate appropriate care, and will be invaluable towards investigating and establishing novel therapies in the earliest stages of this disease,” he says.