Wearable brain monitoring detects altered prefrontal responses during cognitive testing in ALS
Original source
Task-Evoked Prefrontal Hemodynamics During Cognitive Assessment in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Using fNIRS. (opens in a new tab)Compass summarised this from the study's abstract.
Study details
- Studied in
- Human
Population inferred from the title and abstract by Compass.
In a pilot study, wearable functional near-infrared spectroscopy detected different prefrontal brain responses in people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) during increasingly difficult cognitive testing. Seven people with ALS and nine healthy controls had similar accuracy and no significant difference in task performance, but their patterns of deoxygenated haemoglobin responses differed in a left frontal brain region as task difficulty increased.
Why this matters
The findings suggest that brain changes during cognitive effort may be detectable even when behavioural test performance remains preserved. Wearable brain monitoring could complement cognitive assessments, but this study does not show that it can yet diagnose ALS, predict progression or change treatment.
Limitations and context
This was a small pilot study involving 16 participants. The results need to be confirmed in larger studies and do not establish why the haemoglobin responses differed or whether fNIRS improves clinical decision-making.