Community memory screening as a strategy for recruiting older adults into Alzheimer's disease research.

Background: Growing awareness of Alzheimer's disease (AD) has prompted a demand for quick and effective ways to screen for memory loss and cognitive decline in large numbers of individuals in the community. Periodic Memory Screening Day events provide free, brief cognitive screening aimed at those 65 years and older, and can serve as an opportunity to gauge participants' attitudes towards AD research and recruit them into ongoing research projects.

Methods: Over 6 single-day events in 2 years, more than 574 individuals were individually screened using the MoCA and a story recall task (immediate and delayed), given feedback about their performance, and introduced to AD research and opportunities to participate.

Safety, Efficacy, and Feasibility of Intranasal Insulin for the Treatment of Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer Disease Dementia: A Randomized Clinical Trial.

Importance: Insulin modulates aspects of brain function relevant to Alzheimer disease and can be delivered to the brain using intranasal devices. To date, the use of intranasal insulin to treat persons with mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease dementia remains to be examined in a multi-site trial.

Objective: To examine the feasibility, safety, and efficacy of intranasal insulin for the treatment of persons with mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer disease dementia in a phase 2/3 multisite clinical trial.

Temporal sequence learning in healthy aging and amnestic mild cognitive impairment.

Unlabelled: BACKGROUND/STUDY CONTEXT: Temporal sequence learning is a critical aspect of episodic memory that may be dependent on the temporal and frontal lobes. Because amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) and normal aging may result in changes within the temporal and frontal lobes, the present study investigated temporal sequence learning in patients with aMCI, cognitively normal older adults, and young adults.

Methods: On each trial of a temporal sequence task, circles appeared one at a time at the end of each arm of a computerized radial eight-arm maze.

When help becomes a hindrance: mental health referral systems as barriers to care for primary care physicians treating patients with Alzheimer's disease.

Objectives: To describe structural barriers to mental health specialists and consequences of these barriers to care for patients with dementia and neuropsychological symptoms and their primary care physicians (PCPs).

Design: Cross-sectional qualitative interview study of PCPs.

Setting: Physicians' offices, primarily managed care.

Deterioration of visual-perceptual organization ability in Alzheimer's disease.

Although deterioration of higher-order visual information processing abilities occurs in Alzheimer's disease (AD), few cross-sectional or longitudinal studies have systematically examined this deficit. The performance of 135 patients with probable AD and 97 matched normal control (NC) participants were compared on a structured test of perceptual organization ability, the Hooper Visual Organization Test (VOT). Both the standard VOT score and a derived score that corrected for anomia were significantly lower for AD patients than for NC participants, but neither score was particularly effective at distinguishing between the groups.

Effectiveness of support groups for people with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease: an evaluative survey.

Support groups can provide a forum for socialization and learning for people with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of these groups based on participant feedback. A survey questionnaire was administered to 70 support group participants with Alzheimer's disease from 8 well-established groups across the United States.

Identification of Alzheimer disease risk by functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Background: Functional magnetic resonance imaging plays a promising role in the preclinical characterization of Alzheimer disease (AD) for use in early diagnosis and in preventive drug trials.

Objective: To determine whether functional magnetic resonance imaging can reliably distinguish risk groups for AD among cognitively normal middle-aged adults.

Design: Cross-sectional case-control study.