July 13, 2020 — By: Marco Meglio
Low-risk, digital video game interventions could represent a clinically valuable approach to improving processing speed in adults with multiple sclerosis.
Riley Bove, MDData from a pilot study (NCT03569618) evaluating a tablet-based video game-style digital treatment, dubbed AKL-T03, showed that the intervention demonstrated substantial and durable improvements in processing speed for adults with multiple sclerosis (MS). Participants in the study were asked to complete 25 minutes daily, for 5 days weekly, over a 6-week stretch after being randomized to either AKL-T03 (n = 23) or a control word game (AKL-T09; n = 21). Both showed increases on Symbol Digit Modalities Test (SDMT) z-scores at Visit 2 (AKL-T03, P <.001; AKL-T09, P = .024), and their respective mean improvements were of 6.10 points (standard deviation [SD], 4.62) and 3.55 points (SD, 7.51; comparison P = .21).The pilot study had patients complete a baseline in-clinic evaluation at Visit 1, a repeat in-clinic evaluation at Visit 2 following 6 weeks of randomization to AKL-T03 or AKL-T09, and a third visit 8 weeks later to determine the persistence of effects. At Visit 3, 70% of participants randomized to AKL-T03 maintained clinically meaningful ≥4-point increase in SDMT above their baseline, compared with 36.8% for AKL-T09 (P = .038).
“Taken together, our findings suggest that this enjoyable, low-risk, non-pharmacological intervention could represent a clinically valuable approach to improving processing speed in adults with MS experiencing a range of minor to moderate impairment in processing speed,” study author Riley Bove, MD, neurologist, Weill Institute for Neurosciences, University of California San Francisco and colleagues concluded.The results also, interestingly, showed that those randomized to AKL-T09 had greater improvements on Brief Visuospatial Memory Test Revised (BVMT-R; AKL-T03: 0.70 [SD, 4.47]; AKL-T09: 3.25 [SD, 5.23]; comparison P = .11) and California Verbal Learning Test Second Edition (CVLT-II; AKL-T03: 2.05 [SD, 9.14]; AKL-T09: 5.20 [SD, 8.60]; comparison P = .27) tasks as compared to participants randomized to AKL-T03.
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