Three-Minute Take-Home Test May Identify Symptoms Linked to Alzheimer's Disease

Meanwhile: the big challenge for screening tests is base rate confounding: the test needs to be drastically more specific the lower the percentage of the cohort that truly has the condition is. Relatively low rates of false positives can pile up quickly against true positives for conditions that are rare in the population.

The bad thing here is: you get a test suggestive of early-onset Alzheimers. It could realistically be the case that the test positive indicates in reality a coin-flip chance you have it. But that doesn't matter, because it will take years for the diagnosis to settle, and your mental health is materially injured in the meantime.

One correction here: the amyloid antibodies that successfully clear out a large amount of plaque have yet to report data from intervention trials prior to symptom onset, so we can’t say this with confidence and in fact we have good reason to suspect they would be more effective at this disease stage.

I wrote about this and related topics here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-defense-of-the-amyloid-h...

Edited to add: the sort of test discussed in the OP wouldn’t be relevant to presymptomatic treatment, however, since it’s a test of symptoms rather than biomarkers for preclinical disease.

Why is this pilot study in the Smithsonian?

Sadly, our latest grant application did not receive funding, but we are supporting other clinical researchers with our technology. Our technology is based on more than a decade of research with 50+ published, peer reviewed studies.

We focus on sleep directly rather than the disease, which means people do not have to wait years for regulatory approvals before they can feel day-to-day benefits.

For those curious about learning more, our approach and links to additional research are on our website https://affectablesleep.com .

Mild-to-moderate Alzheimer’s changes in sleep https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jagp.2024.07.002

Slow-wave activity, memory, and amyloid response https://doi.org/10.1093/ageing/afad228

I believe replication is key.

It was amazing when the room temperature superconductor paper came out about 18 months ago, the immediate response was to share the news, and then replicate.

Have you seen the research in phase-targeted auditory stimulation, memory, amyloid, and sleep? Do you have thoughts on that?

Acoustic stimulation during sleep predicts long-lasting increases in memory performance and beneficial amyloid response in older adults - https://doi.org/10.1093/ageing/afad228

Acoustic Stimulation to Improve Slow-Wave Sleep in Alzheimer's Disease: A Multiple Night At-Home Intervention https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jagp.2024.07.002

All the best on your research and funding. Quality sleep has been undervalued, especially among work cultures that value overachieving at the expense of personal health.

I don't think she's the first to postulate this, but I believe she is researching this relationship now.

Though work culture is an important one, we're somewhat more focused on the less self-imposed sleep challenges related to maternity and perimenopause/menopause.

Is that what you meant? I assumed you meant from a privacy perspective.

I hadn’t seen that research, thanks for passing it along. It seems like an interesting approach to improve slow wave sleep, which is known to help with amyloid clearance.

Almost everyone on our team is on Android, but we wanted to iterate on the platform that most users are on and focus on getting that experience right.

Sales will somewhat depend on when we bring on someone to pick up the Android front-end.

We're a really small team, and with hardware, firmware, services, and apps, the engineering footprint becomes quite large.

What often doesn't get factored in is manufacturing test rigs, plus we have software to support clinical research.

I'm not complaining about it, but holding off on Android seemed to be the right move, as we can't remove any of the other functions. We've had quite a few requests for Android.

> linked to

Really putting their necks on the chopping block and making with the bold opinions, here.

There was a comment on reddit a few days ago from someone with narcolepsy who was looking for a sleep tracker.

Sadly, our technology does not "induce" deep sleep.

It is suspected that the reason the Alzheimer's study showed such an increase in deep sleep was due to decreased cortisol as a result of stimulation, but that is just a theory at this point.

Studies do show a decrease in night-time cortisol (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-017-02170-3) early in the night during stimulation.

> And accumulation of them is like a viscious cycle

I don’t know what this slip meant though ;-)

Unintentional, but I like it!

If the toilet was invented today, plumbers would all be telling us how $1/shit is a steal.

It's correlated eith amnestic MCI, ehich itself correlated with higher risk of alzheimers(edit0:typo) (that's what I'm reading from the begining of the paragraph you quoted)

Just red flags everywhere.

On our site we simplify the language. That is partly because of the regulations do not allow us to make clinical claims prior to approval, and partly because explaining the neuroscience in detail would overwhelm most visitors.

I link to the research so those interested can dive in deeper, and that is allowed.

Startups are hard at the best of times, hardware startups are harder. When the company making the hardware inevitably goes under, you are left with a useless piece of plastic that you paid a ton of money upfront for, and then paid a hefty sum every month on top.

The build-up isn't scarring. It's misfolded proteins in the brain which stick in places they shouldn't and the glymphatic system which flushes cerebrospinal fluid through the brain removes the build-up of these protiens.

If you have poor sleep or lack of sleep, these proteins don't get removed and that build-up interferes and disrupts the firing of neurons.

Alzheimer's drugs are able to help remove the build-up, but unfortunately are not able to repair the damage. That's why they only slow progression of the disease, not treat it.

If slow-wave enhancement lives up to the potential, it would likely also only be preventative. It would be surprising if it was able to treat AD.

If you want to know more, a comment in this post has what I think may be the most thorough breakdown of AD. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-defense-of-the-amyloid-h...

The reason we use a subscription is to keep the upfront cost much lower. It's important to us that we make better sleep as accessible as possible. A one-time payment makes that more challenging at this stage.

We also wanted to keep things simple at checkout. Too many options can be confusing, and at this early stage our priority is making it straightforward for people who want to try the technology.

It's a delicate balance.

To help you a bit: 1 is easier… So 1 hardware product working independently is what we want. If you must to appease the shareholders do a subscription…make it add some functionality that would be impossible without a subscription… But locking people in a subscription to “keep upfront cost lower” is devious at best. Add to the world..don’t (cash)grab.

Your first FAQ answer begins extremely apprehensively. Is that even the number one most frequently asked question? I would suggest heavily revising that answer or getting rid of it completely.

Many devices today support dark mode, such as my S24. The website does not display clearly in this mode.

On dark mode, we deliberately avoided it. Most sleep products lean into dark, sleepy visuals, which makes sense if the goal is to help people fall asleep or stay asleep. Our product doesn’t do that, so we are careful not to give the impression that it does, even though sleep is at the center of what we build. Our hope is that the brightness of our brand doesn’t mislead people, or lets us prevent them from misleading themselves.

Does that make sense?