New Testing May Help Predict Dementia

Ivanhoe Newswire
Thursday, August 21, 2008; 4:15 AM

(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- A new twist on traditional testing may help better predict and diagnose dementia.

A new report from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine suggests that within-person variability on neuropsychological testing may be associated with the development of dementia in older adults.
 
The authors write, "When neuropsychological tests are used for diagnostic purposes, an individual's level of performance on specific tests is measured against healthy normative samples to determine cognitive impairment. However, this approach does not take into account intra-individual variability in cognitive function." Intra-individual variability is described as inconsistency in cognitive performance within a person.

The study looked at 897 people, age 70 or older. Every 12 to 18 months, participants had detailed neurological and neuropsychological evaluations, including tests for verbal IQ, attention/executive function and memory. The study focused on whether within-person across-neuropsychological test variability predicts future dementia.
 
Results show 61 cases of incident dementia were identified during the follow-up period – an average of 3.3 years. The study also found 47 participants developed incident dementia of the Alzheimer type; 18 developed incident vascular dementia. During the study, 128 people died, as was expected because of the participants' age – of them, 18 had developed incident dementia.
 
The authors conclude within-person across-neuropsychological test variability was associated with development of dementia, and this finding needs to be replicated in different populations before it is applied in a clinical setting.

SOURCE: JAMA, 2008;300:823-830

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