Do patients diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease benefit from a psycho-educational programme for family caregivers? A randomised controlled study.

Objective: The Aide dans la Maladie d'Alzheimer (AIDMA) study was conducted to determine whether a psycho-educational programme (PEP) for primary caregivers in addition to standard anti-dementia drugs for patients improves caregivers' psychological condition and patients' activities of daily life.

Method: Multicentre randomised controlled intervention trial. One hundred and sixty-seven dyads 'patient-caregiver' were recruited from 15 French memory clinics and randomised in two parallel groups.

Probing the structural factors influencing columnar mesophase formation and stability in triphenylene discotics.

Series of structurally related substituted triphenylene derivatives were designed and synthesised to interrogate key features which determine mesophase formation and stability, and to challenge the general conclusions previously proposed by us and others. It is apparent that no single, simple principle can be universally applied.

Relevance of 10-min delayed recall in dementia screening.

Within the context of early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD), there is a growing interest in neuropsychological screening tests. Amongst these tests, we focused on the largely used Memory Impairment Screen (MIS). The objective of the present work was to show that adding a 10-min delayed recall to the MIS, improves the test psychometric characteristics in order to detect dementia in the earliest stages.

Accidental MCI in healthy subjects: a prospective longitudinal study.

A study was realized on 130 healthy and autonomous volunteers (60-80 years old) who met specific medical and functional inclusion criteria. A comprehensive battery of neuropsychological tests was performed at baseline (M0), 6 and 12 months (M6, M12). At M0 the results indicated that 65% were cognitively normal on each of all the neuropsychological tests, whereas 35% presented a cognitive deficit on one or more tests.