A new study has found that strange visual disorders happen early in around 10 percent of Alzheimer’s incidents, and when it occurs, it indicates the imminent arrival of Alzheimer’s disease. Strange visual disorders are also known as posterior cortical atrophy (PCA). It causes abrupt trouble in doing vision-related tasks such as judging if an object is stationary or moving, writing, or simply picking up a fallen item despite a normal and healthy eye test. The findings of the study also reveal that people who suffer from posterior cortical atrophy later are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 94 percent of cases. In the rest of 6 percent of incidents, patients have developed other forms of dementia such as Lewy body disease or frontotemporal lobar degeneration.
The co-author of the study, Marianne Chapleau has said that there is a need for spreading more awareness about PCA, hence, it can be easily identified and treated by healthcare professionals. The authors of the study assessed more than 1000 patients across 16 nations at 36 locations. Experts said that PCA showed a tendency to appear at a young age of 59 years on average. The findings revealed that patients with PCA were not able to precisely copy easy diagrams and had difficulty in judging the location of objects and perceiving the number of objects at a time. Math and reading skills also start to weaken.
The authors of the study have said that PCA is far more prognostic of dementia as compared to memory loss as only 70 percent of people with memory loss are diagnosed with dementia later in life. Health experts say that several people who are recently diagnosed with PCA do not show any cognitive issues initially, nevertheless, the findings of the study have revealed that by around four years later, mild or modest insufficiencies in executive function, memory, behavior, and speech and language function became visible. The findings of the new study have been released in the journal Lancet Neurology.