An informant questionnaire for detecting Alzheimer's disease: are some items better than others?

A decline in everyday cognitive functioning is important for diagnosing dementia. Informant questionnaires, such as the informant questionnaire on cognitive decline in the elderly (IQCODE), are used to measure this. Previously, conflicting results on the IQCODEs ability to discriminate between Alzheimer's disease (AD), mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and cognitively healthy elderly were found.

How useful is the IQCODE for discriminating between Alzheimer's disease, mild cognitive impairment and subjective memory complaints?

Background: Informant questionnaires may be useful in diagnosing early dementia. Conflicting results were found when these questionnaires were used to differentiate patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) from healthy elderly subjects. We evaluated the ability of the most commonly used informant questionnaire, the Informant Questionnaire on Cognitive Decline in the Elderly (IQCODE), to discriminate between Alzheimer's disease (AD), MCI and subjective memory complaints (SMC).

Reverse breeding: a novel breeding approach based on engineered meiosis.

Reverse breeding (RB) is a novel plant breeding technique designed to directly produce parental lines for any heterozygous plant, one of the most sought after goals in plant breeding. RB generates perfectly complementing homozygous parental lines through engineered meiosis. The method is based on reducing genetic recombination in the selected heterozygote by eliminating meiotic crossing over.