The 'preclinical phase' of probable Alzheimer's disease. A 13-year prospective study of the Framingham cohort

Abstract

Objective: To evaluate the interval between the onset of detectable cognitive impairment and clinical diagnosis in individuals with probable Alzheimer's disease (AD), and to identify the pattern of the earliest changes in cognition in probable AD.

Design: Longitudinal follow-up of a community-based cohort sample. In 1976 through 1978, a screening neuropsychological examination was administered to Framingham Study participants. These subjects were then followed up prospectively for development of probable AD for up to 13 years.

Setting: This study was conducted at a community-based center for epidemiologic research.

Participants: The surveillance sample consisted of 1045 participants in the Framingham Study aged 65 to 88 years who were free of dementia at the time of the neuropsychological screening examination.

Main outcome measures: Scores on a group of neuropsychological tests were entered into a series of age- and education-adjusted multiple regression procedures, with the presence or absence of probable AD as the outcome variable.

Results: Considered individually, most of the screening neuropsychological measures were significantly related to later AD diagnosis. When stepwise regression procedures were employed, only measures of verbal memory and immediate auditory attention span remained significantly related to AD diagnosis. Of note, subjects later diagnosed with probable AD performed at higher levels than normal subjects on the Digit Span test at initial screening. Regression results were essentially unchanged even when the AD sample was restricted to those individuals for whom the screening examination preceded the clinical onset of dementia by 7 years or more.

Conclusions: These findings support previous contentions that a "preclinical phase" of detectable cognitive deficits can precede the clinical diagnosis of probable AD by many years, and they also support the hypothesis that problems with secondary verbal memory are among the first signs of AD.