Vestibular contribution to path integration deficits in ‘at-genetic-risk’ for Alzheimer’s disease

Coughlan, Gillian, Plumb, William, Zhukovsky, Peter, Aung, Min Hane and Hornberger, Michael (2023) Vestibular contribution to path integration deficits in ‘at-genetic-risk’ for Alzheimer’s disease. PLoS One, 18 (1). ISSN 1932-6203

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Abstract

Path integration changes may precede a clinical presentation of Alzheimer’s disease by several years. Studies to date have focused on how spatial cell changes affect path integration in preclinical AD. However, vestibular input is also critical for intact path integration. Here, we developed the vestibular rotation task that requires individuals to manually point an iPad device in the direction of their starting point following rotational movement, without any visual cues. Vestibular features were derived from the sensor data using feature selection. Machine learning models illustrate that the vestibular features accurately classified Apolipoprotein E ε3ε4 carriers and ε3ε3 carrier controls (mean age 62.7 years), with 65% to 79% accuracy depending on task trial. All machine learning models produced a similar classification accuracy. Our results demonstrate the cross-sectional role of the vestibular system in Alzheimer’s disease risk carriers. Future investigations should examine if vestibular functions explain individual phenotypic heterogeneity in path integration among Alzheimer’s disease risk carriers.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Data Availability: The raw and pre-processed data, demographic participant data, and the code for the machine learning algorithms are available at: https://github.com/WillPlumb/Vestibular-PreAD.
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > Norwich Medical School Faculty of Science > School of Computing Sciences
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Norwich Epidemiology Centre Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > Research Groups > Norwich Epidemiology Centre Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Health Computing Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Colour and Imaging Lab Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > Research Centres > Norwich Institute for Healthy Aging Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > Research Centres > Mental Health and Social Care (fka Lifespan Health) Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > Research Groups > Mental Health
Related URLs:	http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?... https://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone...
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	10 Feb 2026 16:36
Last Modified:	19 Feb 2026 11:30
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/101900
DOI:	10.1371/journal.pone.0278239

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