#97 – Dr Dennis Chan

Academic Neurologist Dr Dennis Chan shares his work on the early detection of Alzheimer’s

To mark Dementia Action Week, Dr Dennis Chan from UCL reveals the ground-breaking work he & research colleagues are doing to detect Alzheimer’s disease – one of the biggest causes of dementia – years, even decades, before symptoms like memory loss show.

Dr Chan explains how Virtual Reality is useful in testing & how everyday digital data like our heart rates, sleep patterns & breathing patterns gathered on smart devices can be crunched to identify ‘fingerprints’ which allow the earliest signs of diseases like Alzheimer’s to be detected.

EDoN – Early Detection of Neurodegenerative diseases – is an ambitious global project, spearheaded by Alzheimer’s Research UK. It’s hoped this kind of big data will help scientists like Dennis make faster breakthroughs, enabling them to test new preventions and treatments.