Explaining the association between social and lifestyle factors and cognitive functions: a pathway analysis in the Memento cohort.

Background: This work aimed to investigate the potential pathways involved in the association between social and lifestyle factors, biomarkers of Alzheimer's disease and related dementia (ADRD), and cognition.

Methods: The authors studied 2323 participants from the Memento study, a French nationwide clinical cohort. Social and lifestyle factors were education level, current household incomes, physical activity, leisure activities, and social network from which two continuous latent variables were computed: an early to midlife (EML) and a latelife (LL) indicator.

Evidencing inhibitory deficits in Alzheimer's disease through interference effects and shifting disabilities in the Stroop test.

To investigate the contribution of inhibitory deficits in the deterioration of executive function abilities in Alzheimer's disease (AD), a modified version of the Stroop test was submitted to 44 AD patients and 44 elderly controls. Half of the subjects performed successively the Interference Stroop task, the two control tasks and the Reverse Stroop task, and half performed the Reverse Stroop task, the control tasks and finally the Interference Stroop task. This experimental design allowed to assess inhibitory deficits by measuring classical interference effects but also by measuring the ability to shift between tasks instructions.

Annual rate and predictors of conversion to dementia in subjects presenting mild cognitive impairment criteria defined according to a population-based study.

Elderly subjects diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) are becoming the target of intervention trials. The criteria used for MCI are principally issued from prospective clinical studies, although longitudinal population-based studies having identified several cognitive predictors of dementia can be of great contribution in the definition of these criteria. This study was conducted to explore the external validity of MCI criteria issued from a longitudinal population-based study, and subsequently to identify the best predictors of the short-term conversion to Alzheimer's disease 2 years after the MCI diagnosis.

Cognitive slowing and learning of target detection skills in pre-demented subjects.

Alzheimer's disease produces a generalized slowing of cognitive processing increasing with the progression of dementia. However little is known about this phenomenon in the pre-demented stages. Our purpose was to investigate cognitive slowing in pre-demented subjects and their ability to develop target detection skills while performing a cancellation task.