Characteristics of elderly who develop Alzheimer's disease during the next two years—a neuropsychological study using CAMCOG. The Odense study
✍ Scribed by Henry Nielsen; Annette Lolk; Kjeld Andersen; Jutta Andersen; Per Kragh-Sørensen
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1999
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 100 KB
- Volume
- 14
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0885-6230
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Objective. The aim of the study was to determine which cognitive functions ®rst deteriorate in Alzheimer's disease (AD) and to identify persons who would become demented 2 years following an initial examination.
Participants. A total of 2452 initially non-demented persons, aged 65±84 years and randomly drawn from the population, who were examined 2 years apart.
Measures. CAMCOG, the cognitive section of CAMDEX (The Cambridge Mental Disorders of the Elderly Examination). Fourteen composite measures were constructed of the 60 CAMCOG items.
Results. During the 2-year period, 102 developed AD; this group had signi®cantly lower scores on all of the 14 composite measures at baseline examination than the subjects who remained non-demented. The incident demented were signi®cantly older than the non-demented, had less formal schooling, were more often unskilled and had lower verbal intellectual level. Logistic regression analyses showed that especially higher age, together with reduced recent and remote memory, low category verbal ¯uency and attentional de®ciency, characterized incident demented 2 years before the diagnosis was made.
Conclusions. Cognitive changes, which develop years before the AD diagnosis, can be identi®ed by means of CAMCOG, but this instrument does not allow identi®cation of persons who later develop AD with sucient precision.