Publications by authors named "Sietske Sikkes"

Introduction: Recruitment of participants for intervention studies is challenging. We evaluated the effectiveness and efficiency of a participant recruitment campaign through an online registry for the FINGER-NL study, a multi-domain lifestyle intervention trial targeting cognitively healthy individuals aged 60-79 with dementia prevention potential. Additionally, we explored which recruitment strategy successfully reached individuals from underrepresented groups in research.

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Objective: Neuropsychological assessment through VideoTeleConferencing (VTC) can help improve access to diagnostic and follow-up care in memory clinics. This study investigated the stability of performance on VTC assessment in relation to in-person assessment using a test-retest design and explored user experiences of VTC assessment.

Materials And Methods: Thirty-one patients (62 ± 6.

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Objectives: We aimed to compare and link the total scores of the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) and Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), two common global cognitive screeners.

Methods: 2,325 memory clinic patients (63.2 ± 8.

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Unlabelled: With the advent of the first generation of disease-modifying treatments for Alzheimer's disease, it is clearer now more than ever that the field needs to move toward personalized medicine. Pooling data from past trials may help identify subgroups most likely to benefit from specific treatments and thus inform future trial design. In this perspective, we report on our effort to pool data from past Alzheimer's disease trials to identify patients most likely to respond to different treatments.

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Background: Digital speech assessment has potential relevance in the earliest, preclinical stages of Alzheimer's disease (AD). We evaluated the feasibility, test-retest reliability, and association with AD-related amyloid-beta (Aβ) pathology of speech acoustics measured over multiple assessments in a remote setting.

Methods: Fifty cognitively unimpaired adults (Age 68 ± 6.

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Background And Objectives: Cognitive decline rates in Alzheimer disease (AD) vary greatly. Disease-modifying treatments may alter cognitive decline trajectories, rendering their prediction increasingly relevant. We aimed to construct clinically applicable prediction models of cognitive decline in amyloid-positive patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or mild dementia.

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Background: Evidence on the effectiveness of multidomain lifestyle interventions to prevent cognitive decline in older people without dementia is mixed. Embedded in the World-Wide FINGERS initiative, FINGER-NL aims to investigate the effectiveness of a 2-year multidomain lifestyle intervention on cognitive functioning in older Dutch at risk individuals.

Methods: Multi-center, randomized, controlled, multidomain lifestyle intervention trial with a duration of 24 months.

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Article Synopsis
  • - Ongoing assessment in postapproval studies for Alzheimer's disease aims to track disease progression and evaluate the effectiveness and safety of treatments in real-world scenarios.
  • - The study faces challenges due to differences in data collection methods across various centers and the diversity of patients compared to those in clinical trials.
  • - Key design elements for these studies include specifying aims and objectives, identifying study populations, and establishing consistent methods for measuring cognition, function, safety, and quality of life.
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Objective: The Amsterdam Instrumental Activities of Daily Living Questionnaire (A-IADL-Q) is well validated and commonly used to assess difficulties in everyday functioning regarding dementia. To facilitate interpretation and clinical implementation across different European countries, we aim to provide normative data and a diagnostic cutoff for dementia.

Methods: Cross-sectional data from Dutch Brain Research Registry ( = 1,064; mean () age = 62 ± 11 year; 69.

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Objective: We investigated how well a visual associative learning task discriminates Alzheimer's disease (AD) dementia from other types of dementia and how it relates to AD pathology.

Methods: 3,599 patients (63.9 ± 8.

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Background: Apolipoprotein-E (APOE) genetic testing for Alzheimer's disease is becoming more important as clinical trials are increasingly targeting individuals carrying APOE-ε4 alleles. Little is known about the interest in finding out one's genetic risk for Alzheimer's disease in the general population. Our objective was to examine this in a sample of cognitively normal (CN) adults within a population-based online research registry with the goal to implement APOE-ε4 status for trial recruitment.

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Background And Objectives: It is unclear to what extent cognitive outcome measures are sensitive to capture decline in Alzheimer disease (AD) prevention trials. We aimed to analyze the sensitivity to changes over time of a range of neuropsychological tests in several cognitively unimpaired, biomarker-defined patient groups.

Methods: Cognitively unimpaired individuals from the Amsterdam Dementia Cohort and the SCIENCe project with available AD biomarkers, obtained from CSF, PET scans, and plasma at baseline, were followed over time (4.

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Introduction: To investigate the utility of a new digital tool for measuring everyday functioning in preclinical Alzheimer's disease, we piloted the Assessment of Smartphone Everyday Tasks (ASSET) application.

Methods: Forty-six participants (50.3 ± 27.

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Objective: We aimed to investigate whether item response theory (IRT)-based scoring allows for a more accurate, responsive, and less biased assessment of everyday functioning than traditional classical test theory (CTT)-based scoring, as measured with the Amsterdam Instrumental Activities of Daily Living Questionnaire.

Method: In this longitudinal multicenter study including cognitively normal and impaired individuals, we examined IRT-based and CTT-based score distributions and differences between diagnostic groups using linear regressions, and investigated scale attenuation. We compared change over time between scoring methods using linear mixed models with random intercepts and slopes for time.

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Introduction: Prior observational work in a heterogeneous cohort of participants with mild cognitive impairment suggests the Amsterdam Instrumental Activities of Daily Living Questionnaire (A-IADL-Q) may have greater sensitivity for functional decline than the more established Alzheimer's Disease Cooperative Study-Activities of Daily Living (ADCS-ADL) scale. However, the relative utility of the A-IADL-Q versus the ADCS-ADL for clinical trials in early Alzheimer's disease (AD) remains uncertain.

Methods: We compared baseline and longitudinal performance of the A-IADL-Q and ADCS-ADL in participants with biomarker-confirmed prodromal (pAD;  = 158) or mild (mAD;  = 283) AD enrolled in the 18-month Tauriel study of semorinemab (NCT03289143).

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Article Synopsis
  • The study addresses the challenges of comparing self-perceived cognitive functioning across various aging studies by linking item-level data from international research.
  • The researchers harmonized data from 24 different studies and found that certain items related to memory and executive functions provided the best measurement precision.
  • This work allows for better comparison and analysis of cognitive functioning in older adults globally, potentially paving the way for improved self-report questionnaires based on the identified key items.
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Article Synopsis
  • The study aimed to evaluate how accurately cognitive functions are measured in participants from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), focusing on those with normal cognition, mild cognitive impairment, and Alzheimer's disease.
  • Using data from participant visits, researchers analyzed scores for memory, executive function, language, and visuospatial skills while calculating the standard errors of measurement for each cognitive domain.
  • Results showed that participants with normal cognition scored the highest, those with mild cognitive impairment scored in the middle, and those with Alzheimer's scored the lowest, with varying measurement precision across cognitive domains, particularly less precise for memory.
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Introduction: We evaluated determinants associated with care partner outcomes along the Alzheimer's disease (AD) stages.

Methods: We included = 270 care partners of amyloid-positive patients in the pre-dementia and dementia stages of AD. Using linear regression analysis, we examined determinants of four care partner outcomes: informal care time, caregiver distress, depression, and quality of life (QoL).

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Introduction: Neuropathological substrates associated with neurodegeneration occur in brains of the oldest old. How does this affect cognitive performance?

Methods: The 100-plus Study is an ongoing longitudinal cohort study of centenarians who self-report to be cognitively healthy; post mortem brain donation is optional. In 85 centenarian brains, we explored the correlations between the levels of 11 neuropathological substrates with ante mortem performance on 12 neuropsychological tests.

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Introduction: In the context of the development of pharmaceutical interventions, expectations and experiences of participants are essential. Their insights may be particularly helpful to address the challenges of recruiting and retaining participants for Alzheimer's disease (AD) clinical trials. We examined clinical trial participants' experiences to optimize trial design in Alzheimer's disease (AD).

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Introduction: We investigated changes in self- and study partner-reported self-perceived cognitive decline in relation to amyloid pathology and clinical progression, in a sample of cognitively normal individuals.

Methods: A total of 404 participants (63 ± 9 years, 44% female) and their study partners completed the Cognitive Change Index (CCI) yearly (0.7-6.

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Introduction: There are limited data on prevalence of dementia in centenarians and near-centenarians (C/NC), its determinants, and whether the risk of dementia continues to rise beyond 100.

Methods: Participant-level data were obtained from 18 community-based studies (N = 4427) in 11 countries that included individuals ≥95 years. A harmonization protocol was applied to cognitive and functional impairments, and a meta-analysis was performed.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study investigates social cognition in the behavioral variant of Alzheimer’s disease (bvAD) compared to other conditions like frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) and typical Alzheimer’s disease (tAD), focusing on emotion recognition, empathy, social norms, and moral reasoning.
  • Results show that bvAD patients scored lower on emotion recognition tests compared to those with subjective cognitive decline (SCD) and tAD but higher than those with bvFTD.
  • Additionally, bvAD patients exhibited lower empathy scores and social norms understanding compared to tAD individuals, while eye movement patterns revealed similar attention to facial features across groups.
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Efficient identification of cognitive decline and Alzheimer's disease (AD) risk in early stages of the AD disease continuum is a critical unmet need. Subjective cognitive decline is increasingly recognized as an early symptomatic stage of AD. Dyadic cognitive report, including subjective cognitive complaints (SCC) from a participant and an informant/study partner who knows the participant well, represents an accurate, reliable, and efficient source of data for assessing risk.

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A crucial aspect of any clinical trial is using the right outcome measure to assess treatment efficacy. Compared to the rapidly evolved understanding and measurement of pathophysiology in preclinical and early symptomatic stages of Alzheimer's disease (AD), relatively less progress has been made in the evolution of clinical outcome assessments (COAs) for those stages. The current paper aims to provide a benchmark for the design and evaluation of COAs for use in early AD trials.

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