Heart Disease: Risk Factors, Prevention, and More

Windows Defender Hub App From Microsoft For Windows 10

Microsoft has released the Windows Defender Hub app, and it is now available for download free from the Windows Store.  The app is nothing exciting as basically it basically only allows you to open the Windows Defender interface and displays some tips, news items, and links to blog posts from the Windows Defender and the Malware Protection Center websites.

Windows Defender Hub gives you access to Windows Defender, so you can easily check your protection status or scan your device. Windows Defender Hub also brings you articles from Microsoft about malware and viruses and the latest security trends, even if you use another antivirus program. Help protect your device with the antimalware protection built in to Windows 10. It's already on your device! There's nothing to buy, no subscriptions, and no nagware.

While one can always open the Windows Defender interface from the system tray icon, the tips that the Windows Defender Hub displays can be of great use to beginners.

The links to the articles, too, open neatly within the app itself.

It would have been interesting if the Windows Defender Hub also offered access to Windows Firewall settings as well as some additional configuration options as well as some options wherein one could tweak some security settings to harden Windows 10 security.

If you are looking for an app that feeds you interesting tips and links about Windows Defender and Security, you can get it from the Microsoft Store.

However, we do hope that Microsoft adds some more features to it in the future to make it more useful.

Smartphone App Could Help Detect Early-onset Dementia Cause, Study Finds

A smartphone app could help detect a leading cause of early-onset dementia in people who are at high risk of developing it, data suggests.

Scientists have demonstrated that cognitive tests done via a smartphone app are at least as sensitive at detecting early signs of frontotemporal dementia in people with a genetic predisposition to the condition as medical evaluations performed in clinics.

Frontotemporal dementia is a neurological disorder that often manifests in midlife, where the part of the brain responsible for skills such as the capacity to plan ahead and prioritise tasks, filter distractions and control impulses, shrinks as the disease progresses.

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About a third of such cases have a genetic cause, but research into the condition has been hampered by problems with early diagnosis and difficulty tracking how people are responding to treatments that may only be effective during the early stages of disease.

"Most frontotemporal dementia patients are diagnosed relatively late in the disease, because they are young, and their symptoms are mistaken for psychiatric disorders," said the study's senior author, Prof Adam Boxer, at the University of California, San Francisco.

Smartphones are already attracting interest as a tool for diagnosing and assessing Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Huntington's diseases. To investigate their utility in frontotemporal dementia, Boxer and his colleagues collaborated with the US-based software company Datacubed Health to develop an app that could record people's speech while they engaged with several cognitive tests, including executive functioning assessments.

"We also created tests of walking, balance and slowed movements, as well as different aspects of language," said Dr Adam Staffaroni, a clinical neuropsychologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and the study's first author.

They tested the app in 360 adults at high genetic risk of developing frontotemporal dementia, including some who had not developed any obvious symptoms yet.

The research, published in JAMA Network Open, found that the app could accurately detect dementia in such individuals, and might even be more sensitive to the earliest stages of the condition than gold-standard neuropsychological evaluations that are usually performed in clinics.

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Although there are no immediate plans to make the app available to the public, Staffaroni said it could help bolster research into the condition.

More than 30 such clinical trials are under way or in the planning stages, including trials of therapies that might help to slow progression of the disease in some gene carriers. "A major barrier has been a lack of outcome measures that can be easily collected and are sensitive to treatment effects at early stages of the disease."

Frequent in-person assessments are also burdensome for patients, caregivers and clinicians. "We hope that smartphone assessments will facilitate new trials of promising therapies," Staffaroni said.

"Eventually, the app may be used to monitor treatment effects, replacing many or most in-person visits to clinical trials' sites."

Smartphone App Accurately Detects Early-onset Dementia, Researchers Say

Of the more than 55 million people globally who have dementia, 10–20% have frontotemporal dementia (FTD).

Researchers have developed a smartphone app featuring cognitive tests that accurately detect FTD.

Scientists report the app is capable of detecting early signs of FTD in people who have a family history of the condition but have not yet shown symptoms.

Researchers estimate that more than 55 million people around the world have dementia. Of that number, between 10–20% have frontotemporal dementia (FTD).

FTD occurs from damage and loss of nerve cells in the frontal and side or temporal areas of the brain. This can result in negative changes to a person's behavior, language skills such as speaking and writing, and movement functions.

There is currently no specific treatment or cure for FTD. Although there are several FTD clinical trials ongoing or in the planning stages, researchers say there are barriers to these trials, including frequent in-person visits for study participants, and some tests are unable to diagnose FTD until symptoms are already noticeable to family and friends.

Now, researchers from the University of California, San Francisco have developed a smartphone app featuring cognitive tests that could potentially help these clinical trials by offering a replacement for in-person visits.

The study, published in JAMA Network Open, shows the smartphone app is capable of detecting early signs of FTD in people who have a family history of the condition but have not yet shown symptoms.

Researchers developed the mobile app in collaboration with a software company.

"We developed this app not only for early detection of FTD but also to help monitor changes in the disease over time once participants have been identified," Adam M. Staffaroni, PhD, clinical neuropsychologist and associate professor in the UCSF Department of Neurology and the Weill Institute for Neurosciences and first author of this study explained to Medical News Today.

"We envision this app may be used in a clinical trial to determine whether a new treatment is effective," Staffaroni said.

"The app includes a comprehensive battery of tests that measure the diverse features of FTD, including speech and language, movement changes, behavior, and cognitive functioning. In this study, we studied tests of executive functioning, a cognitive skill often affected in FTD. We found that scores on these tests could differentiate patients with FTD from controls, and was sensitive to early stages of the disease."

— Adam M. Staffaroni, PhD, first study author

For this study, Staffaroni and his team tested the mobile app on 360 study participants with an average age of 54 enrolled in ongoing studies at the ALLFTD centers and UCSF.

Of this participant pool, about 21% showed symptoms of FTD, about 20% presented with early signs of the disease, and about 60% did not have FTD or were gene carriers of the disease who had not yet developed symptoms.

After using the mobile app, researchers found the app's cognitive tests showed moderate to excellent reliability compared with current standard measures, including in-person disease assessments and neuropsychological tests.

Scientists also reported the cognitive tests delivered through the smartphone app accurately detected dementia and were also more sensitive to the earliest stages of genetic FTD than standard neuropsychological tests.

"Although these smartphone tests are gamified versions of well-established cognitive tests, we could not assume that the smartphone versions were accurately measuring executive functioning," Staffaroni said.

"We had participants take the tests up to three times over two weeks and demonstrated that scores were very similar each time they took the test."

"This suggests the scores are reliable. We then showed that scores on the smartphone tests were highly correlated with our gold-standard, in-person cognitive measures of executive functioning, suggesting they are indeed measuring executive functioning. We also found that poorer performance on the tests was associated with more brain volume loss, suggesting that the measurements are relevant to the biology of the disease."

— Adam M. Staffaroni, PhD, first study author

Staffaroni said that this mobile app is not intended for use by the general public.

"This study was a first step in establishing that we can accurately measure cognition in participants already diagnosed with FTD using a smartphone test," he explained. "These results, however, do not provide all the rigorous evidence needed for a test to be moved into the clinic."

"Although at some point this type of tool may be used in a clinical setting, our near-term vision is developing a scalable tool to accelerate advancements in observational research studies and clinical trials," Staffaroni continued.

"This tool could be used to screen patients who might be eligible for clinical trials. It could also be used to deploy outcome assessments in decentralized clinical trials, in which remote data collection supplements or replaces traditional in-person assessments of treatment effectiveness."

MNT also spoke with Karen D. Sullivan, PhD, a board certified neuropsychologist, owner of I CARE FOR YOUR BRAIN, and Reid Healthcare Transformation Fellow at FirstHealth of the Carolinas in Pinehurst, NC, about this study.

Sullivan commented that while digital approaches to neuropsychological assessment have advantages, which include the important goal of increased capacity to cognitively evaluate many individuals quickly, she has significant concerns about over-reliance on brief computerized assessments in dementia.

"Smartphone apps may have a role but as one tool in a larger tool belt. We will always need the qualitative data that a human-to-human-based assessment can provide. Interpretation of cognitive data is reliant on dozens of other factors that cause neuropsychologists to either increase or reduce our confidence on test data collected."

— Karen D. Sullivan, PhD, neuropsychologist

"Composite scores, like those used in this study, often lack sensitivity for how the subject's score was derived like their problem-solving approach, error analysis, task-completion strategies, emotional response, etc., and are decontextualized from everyday function," Sullivan continued.

"Cognitive test scores do not exist in a vacuum; they are intended to be one part of an integrated analysis. I'd like to see more patient experience studies and concurrent validity analysis with comprehensive neuropsychological test batteries," she added.

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