What’s the story? Why forgetting the start might be an indicator of dementia

FORGETTING the start of a story may be an early sign of dementia, according to experts.

More than 90,000 people in Scotland are living with the condition, for which there is currently no cure.

Now scientists have found delayed narrative recall to be associated with higher levels of a protein in the brain known as amyloid beta, which is an indicator of Alzheimer’s disease.

The team said the findings, published in the Journal Of Neuropsychology, could be an “inexpensive and accurate way of identifying dementia in people who are otherwise asymptomatic”.

Dr Davide Bruno, from the School of Psychology at Liverpool John Moores University, who is first author on the study, said: “Presence of amyloid plaques in the brain is hypothesised to kickstart neurodegeneration in Alzheimer’s disease.

“While we are not sure exactly why, forgetting what we learn at the beginning tells us that Alzheimer’s pathology may be settling in. We think it may be related to preserving information about the order of events – a fundamental feature of memory loss that is somewhat akin to a canary in a coal mine, so to speak.”

A team of scientists from Liverpool John Moores University and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA, analysed data from the Wisconsin Registry of Alzheimer’s Prevention, which is an ongoing family history study of Alzheimer’s disease.

They investigated the memory performance of 653 participants to discover whether it was easier for them to remember the first part of the story compared to the middle of the story.

Mr Bruno said: “We knew that people forgetting the first things on a list were at heightened risk of dementia, so we wanted to find out if it was the same for other types of memory.”

The researchers then looked at a sub-sample of 223 individuals to see whether having evidence of amyloid plaques in the brain was linked to how well they remembered the beginning of two stories that are part of a common neuropsychological test.

The authors found forgetting the beginning of a story was associated with higher levels of amyloid in the brain.

Mr Bruno said: “Not all memory is the same.

“Remembering a story may be easier than remembering items on a list because a story benefits from a coherent structure.

“And so we were not sure whether the order in which information was learned would still have an effect in memory when recalling a story.

“It turns out that it does.” Dementia is an umbrella term for more than 100 different types of diseases and symptoms.

A common thread with all of these diseases is that they damage brain cells.

Dementia can affect every area of human thinking, but how the illness affects someone depends on which area of their brain is damaged.