App Based Digital Therapy for Alzheimer Disease Shown to be Feasible 

As published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR),a study of an app-based digital cognitive therapy (Constant Therapy Health, Lexington, MA) showed it is feasible for use in people with Alzheimer disease (AD) in the mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and mild dementia stages. 

Feasibility analyses were computed for participants who completed 24 weeks of an digital cognitive therapy and found long-term use was feasible for about 32 minutes daily with an adherence rate of 80% (121 out of 168 days). Participants showed an overall improvement in accuracy and latency (P=.005) in the digital cognitive therapy scores. Tasks of visual and auditory memory, attention, and arithmetic also improved. The digital cognitive therapy group improved in the Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status (RBANS) coding subtest.

The study included 19 participants, age 50 to 90, with a diagnosis of MCI secondary to AD or mild AD who were randomly assigned to receive the digital cognitive therapy or paper and pencil games as an active comparator. All participants were assessed using the RBANS every 6 weeks. Higher engagement was seen with the digital therapy.

“The goal of the study was to determine the feasibility of a long-term home-based cognitive training intervention for patients with mild dementia from Alzheimer’s disease. While medications available have been shown to help slow disease progression in AD, supplementing pharmacological interventions with nonpharmacological interventions has been shown to sustain cognition and quality of life more than medications alone,” said Dr. Andrew Budson, senior author on the study and associate director at the Boston University AD Research Center, professor of Neurology at Boston University School of Medicine, and Chief of Cognitive Behavioral Neurology at the Veterans Affairs (VA) Boston Healthcare System. “We found that patients in the treatment cohort were able to use Constant Therapy daily and consistently for the entire study period of 24 weeks. We are encouraged by the results and believe that these findings support the development of future randomized, controlled trials to further investigate the efficacy of digital therapeutics like Constant Therapy to sustain cognitive function in patients with AD.”

No adverse events were observed in the study.