Related amyloid burden and cortical atrophy in individuals with subtle cognitive decline.

Background And Purpose: Subtle cognitive decline represents a stage of cognitive deterioration in which pathological biomarkers may be present, including early cortical atrophy and amyloid deposition. Using individual items from the Montreal Cognitive Assessment and k-modes cluster analysis, we previously identified three clusters of individuals without overt cognitive impairment: (1) High Performing (no deficits in performance), (2) Memory Deficits (lower memory performance), and (3) Compound Deficits (lower memory and executive function performance). In this study, we sought to understand the relationships found in our clusters between cortical atrophy on MR and amyloid burden on PET.

GenBank as a source to monitor and analyze Host-Microbiome data.

Motivation: Microbiome datasets are often constrained by sequencing limitations. GenBank is the largest collection of publicly available DNA sequences, which is maintained by the National Center of Biotechnology Information (NCBI). The metadata of GenBank records are a largely understudied resource and may be uniquely leveraged to access the sum of prior studies focused on microbiome composition.

Using the Montreal cognitive assessment to identify individuals with subtle cognitive decline.

Objective: Dementia is a devastating neurological disease that may be better managed if diagnosed earlier when subclinical neurodegenerative changes are already present, including subtle cognitive decline and mild cognitive impairment. In this study, we used item-level performance on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) to identify individuals with subtle cognitive decline.

Method: Individual MoCA item data from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative was grouped using -modes cluster analysis.