How Dominant Hand and Foot Dexterity May Reveal Dementia Onset: A Motor and Cognitive Dual-Task Study^.

The combined provision of an arising number of dementia cases, and the substantial absence of effective treatments, led the scientific community toward the identification of early phases of this condition. Such an effort aims at the recognition of therapeutic windows and the characterization of the disease's different grades. In the last years, Motor and Cognitive Dual-Tasks (MCDT) have been widely used to address the early diagnosis of several neurocognitive disorders, among which dementia. Here we present different protocols: the walking MCDT, the toe-tapping MCDT, and the forefinger-tapping MCDT. Moreover, each task has been performed under different cognitive conditions: no cognitive effort, counting backwards by 1, 3, and 7. In this work, we report the results obtained through the combination of different motor and cognitive tasks, and we present 2 brand-new MCDT protocols, attempting to identify a sweet-spot for early diagnosis of dementia.