Quality of life and caregiver burden in familial frontotemporal lobar degeneration: Analyses of symptomatic and asymptomatic individuals within the LEFFTDS cohort.

Objective: The Longitudinal Evaluation of Familial Frontotemporal Dementia Subjects evaluates familial frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) kindreds with MAPT, GRN, or C9orf72 mutations. Objectives were to examine whether health-related quality of life (HRQoL) correlates with clinical symptoms and caregiver burden, and whether self-rated and informant-rated HRQoL would correlate with each other.

Methods: Individuals were classified using the Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR ) Scale plus National Alzheimer's Coordinating Center (NACC) FTLD.

Nonlinear Z-score modeling for improved detection of cognitive abnormality.

Introduction: Conventional Z-scores are generated by subtracting the mean and dividing by the standard deviation. More recent methods linearly correct for age, sex, and education, so that these "adjusted" Z-scores better represent whether an individual's cognitive performance is abnormal. Extreme negative Z-scores for individuals relative to this normative distribution are considered indicative of cognitive deficiency.