Item-Level Story Recall Predictors of Amyloid-Beta in Late Middle-Aged Adults at Increased Risk for Alzheimer’s Disease

Frontiers in Psychology

Lianlian Du¹  Bradley Christian³  Bruce Hermann⁴  Sterling Johnson⁵  Davide Bruno⁶  Rebecca Langhough Koscik⁸  Kimberly D. Mueller⁸  Tobey Betthauser⁸ 

[1] Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics, School of Medicine and Public Health, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, United States;Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, United States;Department of Medical Physics, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, United States;Department of Neurology, School of Medicine and Public Health, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, United States;Geriatric Research Education and Clinical Center, William S. Middleton Veterans Hospital, Madison, WI, United States;School of Psychology, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, United Kingdom;Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, United States;Wisconsin Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, School of Medicine and Public Health, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, United States;

关键词: Alzheimer’s disease;    mild cognitive impairment;    language;    dementia;    positron emission tomography;    amyloid beta;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2022.908651

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundStory recall (SR) tests have shown variable sensitivity to rate of cognitive decline in individuals with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) biomarkers. Although SR tasks are typically scored by obtaining a sum of items recalled, item-level analyses may provide additional sensitivity to change and AD processes. Here, we examined the difficulty and discrimination indices of each item from the Logical Memory (LM) SR task, and determined if these metrics differed by recall conditions, story version (A vs. B), lexical categories, serial position, and amyloid status.Methodsn = 1,141 participants from the Wisconsin Registry for Alzheimer’s Prevention longitudinal study who had item-level data were included in these analyses, as well as a subset of n = 338 who also had amyloid positron emission tomography (PET) imaging. LM data were categorized into four lexical categories (proper names, verbs, numbers, and “other”), and by serial position (primacy, middle, and recency). We calculated difficulty and discriminability/memorability by item, category, and serial position and ran separate repeated measures ANOVAs for each recall condition, lexical category, and serial position. For the subset with amyloid imaging, we used a two-sample t-test to examine whether amyloid positive (Aβ+) and amyloid negative (Aβ−) groups differed in difficulty or discrimination for the same summary metrics.ResultsIn the larger sample, items were more difficult (less memorable) in the delayed recall condition across both story A and story B. Item discrimination was higher at delayed than immediate recall, and proper names had better discrimination than any of the other lexical categories or serial position groups. In the subsample with amyloid PET imaging, proper names were more difficult for Aβ+ than Aβ−; items in the verb and “other” lexical categories and all serial positions from delayed recall were more discriminate for the Aβ+ group compared to the Aβ− group.ConclusionThis study provides empirical evidence that both LM stories are effective at discriminating ability levels and amyloid status, and that individual items vary in difficulty and discrimination by amyloid status, while total scores do not. These results can be informative for the future development of sensitive tasks or composite scores for early detection of cognitive decline.

【 授权许可】

Unknown