Bioplattern analysis and subject-specific diagnosis and care of dementia

Worldwide, the number of people that develop Alzheimer's disease and other types of dementia is rapidly rising and will create a considerable financial burden on the health and social services. The availability of new drugs that may slow or even halt the disease progression makes accurate early detection crucial. Objective methods are needed to support clinical diagnosis and care for patients; to quantify severity, monitor progression and response to new treatments. Electrophysiological markers have an important role to play in the objective assessment and care for dementia. The EEG provides a measure of brain dysfunction and EEG changes could be detected fairly early in the dementing process. Subject-specific EEG analysis offers the possibility of using objective methods to assess and care for dementia on an individual basis. The main objectives of this paper are: (i) to introduce the concepts of subject-specific EEG analysis as a basis for improving diagnosis and care for dementia; and (ii) present two novel methods for deriving suitable subject-specific electrophysiological markers - analysis of fractal dimension and zero crossing interval density of the EEG. We present findings that indicate that the methods are potentially good candidates for the development of individualized, low-cost, easy to administer and reasonably accurate methods for detecting dementia within the growing at risk population.