Tracking Early Alzheimer’s Disease Over Time Through Spatial Navigation

This project will follow participants over time to test whether subtle changes in spatial navigation can predict Alzheimer’s disease progression and reveal the brain changes that drive it.

Alzheimer’s disease often damages the brain long before memory problems appear. Current tests and blood markers cannot fully capture these earliest changes. This project uses virtual reality navigation tasks, advanced brain imaging, and spinal fluid tests to study “path integration”—the ability to track one’s position while moving—which is disrupted very early in Alzheimer’s. By linking these navigation changes to brain and molecular changes, this work aims to develop a sensitive new tool for early detection and monitoring of the disease.

The project is innovative because it applies the gold-standard longitudinal approach to test whether spatial navigation, a promising marker of early Alzheimer’s disease, can predict future decline. This project is also unique because it combines virtual reality navigation tasks with advanced brain imaging and biological markers to understand why these navigation problems occur. Together, this approach could reveal a sensitive new way to track Alzheimer’s disease progression and connect everyday behavior to the underlying brain changes.

Once complete, this study could help develop a more sensitive test for detecting Alzheimer’s disease at an earlier stage, when treatments are most likely to be effective. Because the navigation task and modeling approach can be used in both humans and rodent models, it could also make clinical trials more sensitive by helping identify the right participants, track disease progression more precisely, and test whether new treatments restore brain function.