SENSITIVE MEMORY TESTS FOR DIFFERENTIATING MCI SUBGROUPS

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This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. Primary support for the subproject and the subproject's principal investigator may have been provided by other sources, including other NIH sources. The Total Cost listed for the subproject likely represents the estimated amount of Center infrastructure utilized by the subproject, not direct funding provided by the NCRR grant to the subproject or subproject staff. This research project is part of an Alzheimer's Disease Research Center (ADRC) grant awarded in 2005. The major goal of this work is to determine whether sensitive behavioral tasks, together with eye-tracking technology, will reveal a profile of performance in MCI patients that is useful in predicting the onset of Alzheimer's disease. Research subjects were recruited from the ADRC Clinical Core and were tested annually. We have successfully administered the preferential looking task together with eye-tracking in these subjects over several years and are now reviewing performance of these subjects in Year 1 together with their current clinical diagnosis. Our findings, which form the basis of an abstract submission to the International Conference on Alzheimer's Disease (ICAD) 2011, show that those subjects that performed poorly on the visual paired comparison task in the first year of testing are very likely to convert to AD within 4 years. This work is important since it allows us to identify the subset of MCI patients that are most at risk for oncoming cognitive decline. Once therapeutic interventions become available, this would be a key at-risk population to be targeted, at a time when the nervous system is less compromised and, accordingly, more likely to benefit.