Finally, some news.

It's been slow news, mostly due to covid, I suspect, so I have been fairly quiet.  But a couple of interesting items have surfaced recently.

One thing with me is that I've begun work on a Spanish edition of Beating the Dementia Monster.  It will be Vencer al Monstruo de Dementia -- or something like that.  I thought I could just run the manuscript through Google Translate and then scan it for major hiccups.  Well, machine learning has helped Google Translate to get pretty good, but it ain't perfect, and it trashed the footnotes in MS Word.  There are a lot of them, and they'll need to be reconstructed manually.  Some friends have connections with professional translators who may be willing to lend a hand with fine-tuning.  My Spanish is good enough that I should be able to find the big boo-boos, but I'll need people more skilled than I am for the fine-tuning.  We'll see where that all goes.

Another thing:  About two years ago I was invited to participate in a study of how Alzheimer's might affect speech, possibly leading to a diagnostic tool.  I submitted a short series of speech samples, but I didn't hear much after that.  As we discussed in Beating the Dementia Monster, I detected very definite changes in my speech as my disease began to develop, and I long believed there is an opportunity in the subject of speech to learn something about the disease.  There was an article in this week's ALZForum about progress in this field.

The article talks about a couple of studies, but not the one that I participated in.  I presume they followed similar strategies -- collecting and analyzing voice samples with artificial intelligence.  There are not a whole lot of conclusions yet, but it seems to be a topic of considerable interest.  The topic got a good deal of attention at the Clinical Trials for Alzheimer's Disease Conference in Boston, November 9-12.  A presentation by a British company called Novoic Ltd. claimed their AI-driven phone app can actually determine if someone is positive for beta amyloid.  That's after it has established the person has MCI.  (Test results for beta amyloid weren't that great so far.)  There are eight trials that are either completed (two), in-progress, or contemplated to test their app.  They seem pretty confident that it will eventually become an accepted diagnostic tool.

One thing that will be required to make any of these technologies work is one or more comprehensive databases containing voice and health history data.  The Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation is trying to build such a database.