Researchers suggest how brain games predict risk of viral infection

If your alertness and reaction speed fluctuate more than usual, you may be more susceptible to a viral illness.

The study was led by experts from the University of Michigan, who worked closely with colleagues from Duke University School of Medicine and the University of Virginia.

Read also | US: FDA approves anti-Alzheimer’s drug

“We all know that if we’re stressed or haven’t had enough sleep, it predisposes us to have a less resilient immune system,” said Alfred Hero, professor emeritus of electrical engineering and computer science at UM John H.Holland. and corresponding author of the study in Scientific Reports.

“This is the first exposure study in humans to show that cognitive performance before exposure to a respiratory virus can predict the severity of infection,” he said.

Subtle variations in daily cognitive performance can signal changes in brain states known to increase the risk of diseases such as stress, fatigue and lack of sleep. The team wanted to measure cognitive function and determine if it was predictive of immune performance after exposure to a respiratory virus. Cognitive variability, measured using a digital home self-test, was found to be highly predictive.

The team studied a cohort of 18 healthy volunteers who took brain performance tests three times a day for three days and then were exposed to a common cold virus called human rhinovirus. The software provided 18 measures of cognitive function, including reaction time, attention, and rapid switching between numbers and symbols, which were combined to derive an index of variability.

“At first, we didn’t find that cognitive function had a significant association with disease susceptibility because we used raw scores. But later, when we looked at change over time, we found found that variation in cognitive function is closely related to immunity and susceptibility,” said Yaya Zhai, a recent Ph.D. graduate in bioinformatics at UM and first author of the study. She and Hero spearheaded the development of the Cognitive Variability Index.

The team assessed viral shedding by using saline solution to wash out the participants’ nasal passages. They determined the presence of viral infection and the amount of virus in the fluid by growing the virus in cell culture. For symptoms, the team used the Jackson Score, in which participants rated themselves from one to three out of eight cold symptoms.

“This is an interesting observation in a relatively small study. Hopefully there will be a chance to confirm these findings in a larger, more definitive study,” said Ronald Turner, professor emeritus of pediatrics at the University of Virginia, which conducted the experiment.

The team is optimistic that smartphone use could eventually help identify periods of heightened susceptibility to the disease, by monitoring cognitive indicators such as typing speed and accuracy as well as the time the user goes to sleep.

“Traditional clinical cognitive assessments that look at raw scores at a given time often don’t provide a true picture of brain health,” said P. Murali Doraiswamy, director of the Neurocognitive Disorders Program at Duke University School of Medicine. , who designed the study’s neurocognitive test.

“At home, periodic cognitive monitoring, via digital self-testing platforms, is the future of brain health assessment,” Doraiswamy said.

The study was part of a project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to find out if it was possible to predict disease susceptibility in soldiers. This project was led by Geoffrey Ginsburg, then a professor at the Duke Center for Applied Genomics and Precision Medicine, and he led the contingent of the team analyzing blood samples for biomarkers that could indicate susceptibility to the disease.

The experiment also uncovered a few genetic markers that may indicate reduced immune function, which the team could explore further in future studies.