What can moments of lucidity teach us about Alzheimer’s?
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What are moments of lucidity in Alzheimer’s and why do they matter?
Hey, it's Ira, and you're listening to Science Friday. Watching a loved one with Alzheimer's or dementia slowly lose their cognitive abilities can be heartbreaking, right? But there's a very interesting side note. While the person you once knew seems to be slipping away, sometimes people with Alzheimer's may briefly seem like their old selves again, remember a child's name long forgotten, or suddenly regain the Ability to have a fluid conversation. So, what do these moments of lucidity really mean for the progression of the disease? And what are their implications for those living with the disease and their caretakers? These are questions that Alzheimer's researcher, Dr. Andrea Gilmore-Baikovsky, hopes to answer.
She's an associate professor of emergency medicine and co-director of the Lucidity in Alzheimer's and Dementia Network. That's the lead network at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much for having me. Oh, so nice to have you. So tell me, what what got you interested in studying these episodes of lucidity?
Okay. Well I'll have to try to give you a short version of a long story. You know, I I first got interested in dementia because I worked as a nursing assistant when I was an undergraduate actually at the great advice of my mother. I wanted to become a scientist, thought I was interested in nursing and she said you better go make sure you can do this. And I had a lot of uh exposure and experience with people living with dementia. And I I think, you know, what really still sticks with me to this day are these moments that some nursing assistants in particular were able to create. Not necessarily lucid moments, but just moments that showed me the person um in a way that I I didn't always see, showed me their ability.
uh to engage in pleasantness, uh their ability to laugh, to have fun, to have appreciation, things that we might often societally and sometimes individually think someone can't do. Um so that's had a lasting impression on me. And I think that that's the origin of what made lucidity interesting.
That really is an interesting story. I is there a definition of a moment of lucidity in someone with Alzheimer's, a specific criteria?
Yeah, it's a great question. Unfortunately, um right now what we're doing as scientists is studying something for which we lack a definition. Which is really challenging.
How did Dr. Andrea Gilmore‑Bykovskyi become interested in studying lucid episodes?
Uh, but what we think these are this, you know, as you mentioned, it's a transient recovery of some type of ability. That's how we observe it. Um, it might look like improved communication, it might look like someone all of a sudden is coherent, they're understanding what's going on and responding appropriately, or they're doing things they haven't done in a long time. And a marker of that often is that it's really surprising to other people. Um, having something be defined by what other people think about it is usually scientifically not optimal. So we have a long ways to go in understanding definitionally what exactly are these episodes.
So because it's it's really not defined, when you study it, you have to create like your own definition, right? How are you able to determine when somebody has a lucid episode?
Oh my gosh. It's such a wonderful and uh challenging question. It's one of the things the Lead Network in particular hopes to stimulate more research about. Uh there are lots of different approaches that different scientists have used to try to address this, and this is one thing the lead network in particular is hoping to um really move forward. And in our research, what we do is we do video observations of individuals um who were living with advanced dementia. And we're very grateful to our participants and to their family members for their contributions to this. So what this video data allows is it allows us to have A direct observational record of what someone's doing. And it allows us to then triangulate different types of data features.
So we have trained individuals review these videos and they generate really concrete computational linguistic measures, which are like ways to describe someone's verbal output.
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