Biomarker Testing: Piercing the Fog of Alzheimer's and Related Dementia.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) and related dementia is one of the growing threats to the sustainability of health and care systems in developed countries, and efforts to find therapies have had scant success. The main reasons for this are lack of efficient therapy, which is linked to too late discovery of the disease itself. With this in mind, biomarkers are recognised as an element which can bring a major contribution to research, helping elucidate the disease and the search for treatments.

The differential impact of unique behavioral and psychological symptoms for the dementia caregiver: how and why do patients' individual symptom clusters impact caregiver depressive symptoms?

Objective: The behavioral and psychological symptoms associated with dementia (BPSD) are highly burdensome to caregivers. While BPSD consist of a wide variety of patient behaviors including depression, physical aggression, and paranoid delusions, it remains unclear whether specific symptoms have a differential impact on caregivers. The aims of this study were 1) to assess how individual BPSD, categorized based on how they may affect caregivers, impact depressive symptoms for dementia patient caregivers and 2) to test the pathways by which BPSD clusters impact caregiver depressive symptoms.