An app to detect dementia

Cognitive assessments administered via a smartphone app are a reliable and valid way to detect frontotemporal dementia (FTD) in high-risk individuals, new research showed.

The study was published online on April 1 in JAMA Network Open.

Although relatively rare, FTD is the top cause of dementia in patients younger than 60 years. Patients are usually diagnosed relatively late in the disease because they are young and because their symptoms may be mistaken for psychiatric disorders.

Staffaroni and colleagues with the ALLFTD Consortium partnered with software company Datacubed Health to develop the ALLFTD-mApp, which includes cognitive, motor, and speech tasks.

The smartphone app showed "moderate to excellent" reliability within a single administration (ie, internally consistent) and across repeated assessments (ie, test-retest reliability), the researchers reported.

Validity was supported by association of smartphones tests with disease severity, criterion-standard neuropsychological tests, and brain volume.

Because the app appears sensitive to early stages of the disease, it could be also used as a screening tool, possibly alongside other remote data collection, to help identify participants that might be appropriate for a clinical trial.