Cited by 508Dementia and Cognitive Impairment ResearchAlzheimer's disease research and treatmentsSpatial Cognition and Navigation

Spatial navigation deficits — overlooked cognitive marker for preclinical Alzheimer disease?

Open access
Coughlan, Gillian, Laczó, Jan, Hort, Jakub, Minihane, Anne-Marie, Hornberger, Michael·2018·Nature Reviews Neurology

Abstract

Detection of incipient Alzheimer disease (AD) pathophysiology is critical to identify preclinical individuals and target potentially disease-modifying therapies towards them. Current neuroimaging and biomarker research is strongly focused in this direction, with the aim of establishing AD fingerprints to identify individuals at high risk of developing this disease. By contrast, cognitive fingerprints for incipient AD are virtually non-existent as diagnostics and outcomes measures are still focused on episodic memory deficits as the gold standard for AD, despite their low sensitivity and specificity for identifying at-risk individuals. This Review highlights a novel feature of cognitive evaluation for incipient AD by focusing on spatial navigation and orientation deficits, which are increasingly shown to be present in at-risk individuals. Importantly, the navigation system in the brain overlaps substantially with the regions affected by AD in both animal models and humans. Notably, spatial navigation has fewer verbal, cultural and educational biases than current cognitive tests and could enable a more uniform, global approach towards cognitive fingerprints of AD and better cognitive treatment outcome measures in future multicentre trials. The current Review appraises the available evidence for spatial navigation and/or orientation deficits in preclinical, prodromal and confirmed AD and identifies research gaps and future research priorities.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1038/s41582-018-0031-x

Cites

161 of 161 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • This cellular pathology explains the early cognitive symptoms of AD, such as memory impairment and spatial disorientation.

    “However, this cellular pathology explains the early cognitive symptoms of AD, such as memory impairment and spatial disorientation [11].”

    From Abnormal accumulation of extracellular vesicles in hippocampal dystrophic axons and regulation by the primary cilia in Alzheimer's disease (2023) · cites this paper as [11]

    In “Neuropathology over the lifetime,” the review says neuronal loss is believed to underlie symptoms including forgetfulness and disorientation. The Introduction also describes spatial disorientation in early AD. The claim presents that proposed causal explanation as established fact, whereas the review qualifies it as a belief. (LLM, conf=0.86)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • Spatial navigation patterns are affected by dementia and are considered as one of the earliest symptoms.

    “Spatial navigation patterns are affected by dementia and are considered as one of the earliest symptoms [112].”

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Coughlan, G., Laczó, J., Hort, J., Minihane, A.-M., & Hornberger, M.
Affiliations
  • University of East Anglia (GB)
  • Charles University (CZ)
Corresponding author
Hornberger, Michael
Venue
Nature Reviews Neurology
Published
2018-07-06
Volume
14
Issue
8
Pages
496-506
ISSN
  • 1759-4758 (ISSN-L)
  • 1759-4766
OpenAlex
W2810517026
Cited by
500
References
159
Citations by year
2026: 63 · 2025: 73 · 2024: 77 · 2023: 90 · 2022: 66 · 2021: 57 · 2020: 38 · 2019: 32 · 2018: 3 · 2017: 1
FWCI
5.02
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Nature Reviews Neurology (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • UEA Digital Repository (University of East Anglia) (acceptedVersion)
Topics
  • Health Sciences › Medicine › Psychiatry and Mental health › Dementia and Cognitive Impairment Research
  • Health Sciences › Medicine › Physiology › Alzheimer's disease research and treatments
  • Physical Sciences › Engineering › Automotive Engineering › Spatial Cognition and Navigation
Keywords
preclinical Alzheimer's disease, spatial orientation, prodromal Alzheimer's disease, episodic memory, cognitive outcome measures, Alzheimer's disease biomarkers
MeSH terms
Alzheimer Disease, Animals, Humans, Biomarkers, Prodromal Symptoms, Spatial Navigation

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review