Each study has a usefulness score out of 100 (rubric version 4.0). Tap a score to see what makes it up.
Highest usefulness score first. Studies without a score come last.
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Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) has often been studied in its association with dementia, yet higher rates of reversion to normal cognition than progression to dementia suggest that MCI does not necessarily lead to dementia.
Why it matters
This review notes that more people with mild cognitive impairment revert to normal cognition than progress to dementia, so mild cognitive impairment does not always lead to dementia. It calls for more study of reversion and suggests better selection criteria could improve future treatment trials, but it reports no treatment itself.
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Cogmed was better on one core WM measure and had higher ratings of satisfaction.
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Factors impacting on time to diagnosis vary with the stage of diagnosis in YOD.
Why it matters
This study of 88 people with young-onset dementia found that the time from symptom onset to dementia diagnosis was often several years and was longer when the person first presented with mild cognitive impairment or depression. It describes diagnostic delays and does not test any treatment or cure.
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Recent findings Anxiety disorders are associated with alterations in fear neurocircuitry such that 'bottom-up' processes in the amygdala which respond to threat are exaggerated, and regulation of these processes by the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and hippocampus is impaired.
Why it matters
Pathological anxiety and chronic stress lead to structural degeneration and impaired functioning of the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, which may account for an increased risk of developing dementia. Pharmacological and nonpharmacological interventions may reverse stress-induced damage in the brain, but longitudinal studies are needed to determine whether reversal is possible.
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Relative to healthy controls, and after accounting for nonverbal executive performance, patients with bvFTD showed deficits of noun and verb naming and single word comprehension, diminished spontaneous propositional speech, and deterioration in naming performance over time.
Why it matters
This study found that patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia showed language deficits including naming and word comprehension problems, with less severe deficits than primary progressive aphasia. It describes language features of frontotemporal dementia and does not test any treatment, cure, or prevention for Alzheimer's disease.
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Sensitive and specific instruments are required to screen for cognitive impairment (CI) in busy clinical practice.
Why it matters
This study compared two screening tools, the Quick Mild Cognitive Impairment screen and the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, in patients referred to a memory clinic. It is about improving detection of mild cognitive impairment, not about treating, curing or preventing Alzheimer's disease.
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The objective of this study was to compare the effect of multisensory stimulation environment (MSSE) and one-to-one activity sessions in the symptomatology of elderly individuals with severe dementia.
Why it matters
In this small pilot trial of 32 people with severe dementia, a multisensory stimulation environment improved some symptom scores compared with one-to-one activity sessions. Because it was a pilot with few participants, these results need confirmation in larger studies before drawing conclusions about treating dementia symptoms.
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Overall, patients dying as a result of non-cancer diseases were twice as likely to be admitted to ICUs at the EOL as patients dying due to cancer.
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Wakefulness, along with fast cortical rhythms and associated cognition, depend on the basal forebrain (BF).
Why it matters
In mice, chemogenetic activation of basal forebrain GABAergic neurons produced sustained wakefulness and high-frequency cortical rhythms, while inhibition increased sleep, and activation of cholinergic or glutamatergic neurons affected state consolidation or EEG but not total wake. These animal findings suggest possible ways to increase forebrain activation in dementia, but they are early research and do not show a treatment or cure for Alzheimer's disease.
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52/100
Scores on the full and abbreviated versions of the MoCA can be linked directly to the MMSE.
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Research increasingly suggests that subjective cognitive decline (SCD) in older adults, in the absence of objective cognitive dysfunction or depression, may be a harbinger of non-normative cognitive decline and eventual progression to dementia.
Why it matters
This overview compared self-report measures of subjective cognitive decline across 19 international studies and found wide variation and little overlap among measures. It documents the heterogeneity of approaches to this emerging concept and offers preliminary recommendations, but reports no treatment or cure.
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Even without subjective cognitive complaints, higher risk of cognitive impairment is presented in the prefrail and frail individuals.
Why it matters
This cross-sectional study found that physically prefrail and frail older adults without cognitive complaints performed worse on cognitive tests, with slowness and weakness most linked to impairment. It is an observational association study and does not test any treatment, cure, or prevention for Alzheimer's disease.
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Given the recent acknowledgement of the complex mixed pathologies that contribute to the clinical expression of dementia, various cohort studies have aimed to examine Alzheimer's disease and cerebrovascular disease as comorbid pathologies, with neuroimaging playing a central role in these studies.
Why it matters
This study compared white matter hyperintensity burden, a marker of cerebrovascular disease, across several cohort studies. It found that the ADNI-1 cohort had minimal white matter hyperintensity burden relative to other large aging and dementia studies.
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Health care aides frequently report care that is rushed and tasks omitted due to lack of time.
Why it matters
Most health care aides in western Canadian nursing homes reported being rushed, and 75% left at least one care task missed during their previous shift. This describes quality of care and staff work life in nursing homes, not the treatment, cure, or prevention of dementia.
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52/100
We studied the biomarker signatures and prognoses of 3 different subtle cognitive impairment (SCI) groups (executive, memory, and multidomain) as well as the subjective memory complaints (SMC) group.
Why it matters
This study looked at biomarker and prognosis patterns in groups with subtle cognitive impairment and subjective memory complaints among 522 healthy controls. It compared CSF Alzheimer's disease biomarkers, MRI, and FDG-PET measures across these groups.
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TBI patients' brains were estimated to be older than their chronological age.
Why it matters
An MRI model trained on 1,537 healthy adults to estimate "brain age" (r = 0.92 with real age) judged the brains of 99 people with traumatic brain injury to be older than their years, on average by 4.66 years for gray matter and 5.97 years for white matter, with wide individual variation (±10.8 and ±11.22 years). This gap was larger in people further from their injury and went with poorer cognition, which the authors read as TBI speeding up brain tissue loss. It is an association study: it did not test any treatment and did not measure Alzheimer's disease itself.
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Data sources EMBASE, CINAHL, MEDLINE, PsychInfo.
Why it matters
This systematic review examined the psychometric properties and clinical utility of cognitive screening tools after stroke. It is about screening for cognitive impairment after stroke and does not test any treatment, so it says nothing about curing or preventing Alzheimer's disease.
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Diabetes mellitus is associated with an increase in the risk of dementia and the proportion of patients who convert from mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to dementia.
Why it matters
This review states that diabetes mellitus is associated with an increased risk of dementia and a greater proportion of patients converting from mild cognitive impairment to dementia. It notes that future challenges are to establish the importance of screening for cognitive impairment in people with diabetes and to develop effective treatments.
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52/100
Additionally, we investigated the relation between cardiac function and MRI markers of subclinical cerebrovascular disease.
Why it matters
In older adults without known heart disease, this study found that subclinical cardiac dysfunction was linked to a higher risk of stroke and dementia. It suggests heart function may matter for brain health, but it does not show that treating heart function prevents dementia.
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These cross-sectional results suggest that cortical changes (regional-specific damage and network breakdown), mediated (in)directly by WMH (tract-specific damage) and other factors (eg, vascular risk factors), might lead to cognitive decline.
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Mediterranean diet is a term used to describe the traditional eating habits of people in Crete, South Italy and other Mediterranean countries.
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Mild cognitive impairment and mild dementia are common problems in the elderly.
Why it matters
This clinical review states that pharmacological treatments are of modest value in mild dementia due to Alzheimer's disease and that there are no approved pharmacological treatments for mild cognitive impairment of any cause. It offers no evidence that any treatment cures or prevents Alzheimer's disease.
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52/100
The aging population is increasing and, therefore, a higher prevalence of cardiac disease is emerging; including hypertension, coronary artery disease, atrial fibrillation and chronic heart failure.
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Our results confirm that vitamin D deficiency is associated with a substantially increased risk of all-cause dementia and Alzheimer disease.
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Twenty-five patients (9.1%) died during the follow-up period (median [interquartile range], 13.3 [11.5-16.1] months), including 4 in-hospital deaths after surgery.
Why it matters
This study designed a predictive model for adverse outcomes in older surgical patients and found that dementia, among other geriatric assessment domains, was associated with increased mortality rates. It concerns predicting postoperative mortality risk, not treating, curing or preventing Alzheimer's disease.
From across this topic
10 of the 7,967 studies in this topic, picked by a fixed rule (a hash of each study's address), not by score or date; each page of this list shows a different 10. The same 10 appear here every time.
- High risk of cognitive and functional decline after postoperative delirium. A three-year prospective study
- A meta-review of stress, coping and interventions in dementia and dementia caregiving
- Discrepancies in assessing intellectual disability levels in adults with Down syndrome: Implications for dementia diagnosis
- The prevalence of dementia in rural Tanzania: a cross-sectional community-based study
- The relationship between hearing impairment and cognitive function: a meta-analysis in adults
- Association Between Lifestyle at Different Life Periods and Brain Integrity in Older Adults
- Dementia with Lewy bodies and Parkinson's disease-dementia: current concepts and controversies
- Preferences for life-sustaining treatments in advance care planning and surrogate decision making
- Cognitive impairment improves the predictive validity of the phenotype of frailty for adverse health outcomes: the three-city study
- Cognitive impairment in the nondemented elderly. Results from the Canadian Study of Health and Aging