Everyday Memory in Patients with Alzheimer's Disease: Fragmentary and Distorted

Abstract

Background: Errors of omission are an established hallmark of memory impairment in Alzheimer's disease (AD). Much less is known about other memory errors in AD such as false memories.

Objective: We investigated false memories in healthy elderly controls (HC; n = 23) and patients with AD (n = 20) using real-life tasks of watching news and commercials.

Methods: Participants received a comprehensive neuropsychological assessment and were shown original news and commercials with a subsequent recognition task to assess veridical and false memories.

Results: Subjective estimate of the number of errors were alike in HC and patients with AD. However, memory performance in both the news and the commercials task was significantly worse in patients with AD. Trail-Making Test and Symbol-Span Test were significant predictors of false memories on viewing news and commercials. In patients with AD, levels of Aβ1 - 42, but not levels of tau-protein were correlated with false memories in both tasks.

Conclusions: Everyday life in patients with AD is impeded not due to the incompleteness of memory but also due to its distortions. Furthermore, it is hindered by the lack of awareness towards these deficits. False memory content in patients with AD is associated with Aβ42 levels in the CSF as a surrogate of the overall extent to which the brain has been affected by AD pathology. Future studies will need to address the impact of this duality of memory failure on everyday life of patients with AD and their proxies in greater detail.

Keywords: Alzheimer’s disease; cerebrospinal fluid markers; episodic memory; everyday life; false memories; memory disorders; neuropsychology.