Objective The extent to which increasing age is associated with impairment in cognitive function, termed cognitive aging, may have been overestimated in prior studies. The inclusion of individuals with severe or uncontrolled systemic medical illness or prodromal neurodegenerative disease in normal aging samples is likely to bias estimates toward lower cognitive performance and inflate estimates...

Neurocognitive deficits in fragile X-associated tremor/ataxia syndrome (FXTAS) involve attentional control, working memory, executive functioning, and declarative and procedural learning. To date, no studies comparing FXTAS with other dementias have been done. We characterize the dementia in FXTAS, comparing it with Alzheimer's disease. Retrospective chart review of 68 adults (50 men, 18 women)...

OBJECTIVES To assess whether C-reactive protein (CRP) and interleukin-6 (IL-6) are associated with low cognitive performance and decline in middle-aged adults. DESIGN/SETTING The Whitehall II study; an ongoing large-scale, prospective occupational cohort study of employees from 20 London-based white-collar Civil Service departments. PARTICIPANTS Data from more than 3000 males and 1200 femal...

Language and communication difficulties may occur in the elderly population. This is the case of the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon and receptive and auditory comprehension difficulties. Few studies have focused on examining the effects of social exposure on maintaining communication in the aging process. OBJECTIVES [1] To describe the communication map of healthy elderly subjects; [2] To searc...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the impact of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) on cognition. METHOD We compared the performance of 17 patients with polysomnographic diagnosis of OSA in brief cognitive tests to that of 20 healthy controls, matched for age and education. The testing battery included the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), Brief Cognitive Screening Battery (BCSB), Digit-Symbol (DS) and Pho...

UNLABELLED Verbal Fluency Tests (VFT) are commonly used to assess executive functions and language in clinical and epidemiological studies. These tests were included to access cognitive function and predictors to its decline in ELSA-Brasil (Longitudinal Study of Adults' Health), a cohort that investigates incidence and predictors of chronic diseases among 15,000 civil servants from six public e...

Much is known about short-term—but very little about the long-term—effects of reading interventions. To rectify this, a detailed analysis of follow-up effects as a function of intervention, sample, and methodological variables was conducted. A total of 71 intervention-control groups were selected (N = 8,161 at posttest) from studies reporting posttest and followup data (M = 11.17 months) for pr...

We present a system for automated phonetic clustering analysis of cognitive tests of phonemic verbal fluency, on which one must name words starting with a specific letter (e.g., ‘F’) for one minute. Test responses are typically subjected to manual phonetic clustering analysis that is labor-intensive and subject to inter-rater variability. Our system provides an automated alternative. In a pilot...

This study used cluster analysis to examine variability in Trail Making Test (TMT) performance in a sample of Operation Enduring Freedom/Operation Iraqi Freedom/Operation New Dawn (OEF/OIF/OND) veterans referred for mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI). Three clusters were extracted, two of which were characterized by level of performance and the third with a unique performance pattern characteri...

BACKGROUND Coffee is one of the most consumed beverages worldwide and the effect on cognition appears to be task specific and vary by age. METHOD In cohort of 14,563 public service workers (35-74 years old) we assessed coffee consumption habits and examined cognitive function using standardized neuropsychological test battery. By linear regression and generalize linear regression with logarit...