Early Detection and Treatment of Emerging Cognitive-Linguistic Impairment in Minority Cognitive Aging and Primary Progressive Aphasia

Project Summary / Abstract Dementia is a daunting public health crisis facing many industrialized nations. A key component of the global action plan for dementia proposed by the World Health Organization (WHO) involves early detection and the development of novel therapeutics.1 There exist great racial and socioeconomic barriers to dementia care in the United States. Many existing neuropsychological measures lack sensitivity to accurately screen for dementia in under-represented minority populations. During the next project period, we will focus on early detection of emerging semantic deficits in naturalistic language samples. Our focus is on changes in language cognition, and physiology of the pupil response function among a cohort of older African American adults at elevated risk for dementia. We will derive age-based norms for language content during narrative production and evoked pupillary dynamics (e.g., speed of pupil dilation) during both the production and perception of language. Our studies will elucidate the relationship between changes in executive functioning and semantic knowledge over the span of five years in a radically underserved population.