The NIHR has awarded £1.8 million to fund the DIADEM (Digital assessment of auditory perception in dementia) project, led by Dr Charles Marshall of the WIPH Preventive Neurology Unit
Current dementia diagnostic tests are ‘blunt’ and expensive, and people who are more deprived or from minoritised ethnic groups tend to be diagnosed later and less accurately. New digital hearing tests that measure early brain changes in dementia could transform dementia diagnosis. The team’s proof-of-concept work shows that these tests can differentiate Alzheimer’s patients from controls with very high accuracy, measure disease severity, monitor response to treatment, and stratify risk of incident dementia over a 10 year follow-up in healthy adults. DIADEM will evaluate the tests in real world settings, in NHS memory clinics serving a diverse and deprived population.