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P3‐029: The usefulness of an autobiographical memory task in assessing dementia severity
Author(s) -
Dreyfus Denise M. Maue,
Roe Cathy M.,
Morris John C.
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
alzheimer's and dementia
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 6.713
H-Index - 118
eISSN - 1552-5279
pISSN - 1552-5260
DOI - 10.1016/j.jalz.2008.05.1592
Subject(s) - recall , episodic memory , autobiographical memory , dementia , psychology , task (project management) , clinical dementia rating , frontotemporal dementia , cognitive psychology , disease , clinical psychology , psychiatry , medicine , cognition , management , pathology , economics
Background: Deficits in episodic memory are useful diagnostic indicators in assessing the presence of Alzheimer’s disease and one of the most sensitive to the earliest signs of the disease. Episodic memory is typically assessed clinically by using standardized memory tasks, such as recall of a story or word lists presented during evaluation. An additional method used at the Washington University Alzheimer Disease Research Center involves querying participants about the details of recent personal events. This project tested whether the outcomes of the autobiographical memory query or the brief episodic memory tasks described below are more highly correlated with the clinicians’ final dementia severity rating. Methods: In the autobiographical memory task, participants (N 852) aged 60 years with no, very mild, or mild dementia were asked to recall two personal events, one occurring over the past week and one over the past month, that had been related to the clinician by an informant. The clinician scored the recounting of each event as largely correct, partially correct, or largely incorrect, and scores for the two events were combined. Brief measures of episodic memory examined were the number of errors on recall of the John Brown phrase from the Short Blessed Test (SBT), and the number incorrect on the MMSE 3-item recall. Spearman rank-order correlations were used to examine associations between scores on the memory tasks and dementia severity, as reflected in the Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR) Sum of Boxes. Results: Scores on the autobiographical recall task were more highly correlated with CDR Sum of Boxes than were scores on the John Brown phrase (p .0001) or MMSE 3-item recall (p .0001). Correlation coefficients (95%CI) with the CDR Sum of Boxes score were .76 ( .74 to .79) for the autobiographical recall scores, .68 ( .64 to .71) for the SBT John Brown phrase, and .65 ( .61 to .69) for MMSE 3-item recall. The correlation coefficients of the two brief episodic memory tasks with Sum of Boxes did not differ from each other (p .1822). Conclusions: Clinicians’ CDR ratings reflect a greater level of agreement with the results of the autobiographical memory task compared to brief episodic memory tasks.