Sound Measurement of Neurological Disorders

BackgroundDementia has emerged as a public health priority for elderly people worldwide.Quality of life (QOL) of people with dementia (PWD) is a desired outcome due to the chronic progressive nature and absence of cure.Planning of QOL improvement interventions can be best done by constructing a methodologically sound index of QOL and an index of overall dementia status. MethodThe paper suggests the transformation of scores of biomarkers, items of different questionnaires, to follow Normal distributions with different parameters for meaningful aggregation to get a normally distributed index ( ) reflecting overall disease status and another index of Quality of life ( ), satisfying desired properties, including quantification of changes by one or a sample of patients over time. ResultsThe indices can be tested across time and space and facilitate the prediction of dementia status using QOL and vice versa.Each index can be computed separately for each socio-economic-demographic factor. can be broken into for emphasizing clinical diagnosis and for neurological tests. ConclusionCombination of ordinal data and ratio level data, like biomarkers, by a simple method, is a novelty.It contributes to comparisons of the biomarkers across the AD continuum.The index Based on cognitive dysfunctions, along with plasma biomarkers, may help to assess changes in biomarkers in cross-sectional and longitudinal data along the AD continuum across gender, age, and types of dementia.