Apolipoprotein E and category fluency: evidence for reduced semantic access in healthy normal controls at risk for developing Alzheimer's disease
Section snippets
Participants
The forty participants included in this study were healthy older adults (50–79 years old) who were enrolled in a longitudinal study examining biomarkers in older controls at risk for dementia (NIMH BIOCARD study). Risk was defined as either increased age or a positive family history of AD. Individuals with a family history of AD had first-degree relatives with AD who had been diagnosed from blood and thyroid tests, MRI, neuropsychological testing and family physician's records, and autopsy
A priori comparisons
The same five dependent measures that were examined by Rosen & Engle (1997) were extracted from each participant's fluency output in the present study: total number of animal names and clusters generated; the mean size of a cluster; the mean retrieval time between clusters; and the mean retrieval time within clusters. The means, standard deviations and P values for the five planned comparisons are reported in Table 2. As previously stated in the introduction of this paper, we were interested in
Discussion
The question that motivated the present study was whether our ɛ4 carriers and non-carriers would show the same pattern of fluency output as Rosen & Engle's low and high span participants (1997). Recall that Rosen & Engle found that their low span individuals generated fewer animal names and clusters, and took longer to access clusters, when compared to the high span individuals. Similarly, our ɛ4 carriers generated fewer animal names and clusters, and took longer to access clusters, when
Acknowledgement
We would like to thank the clinical staff of the Geriatric Psychiatry Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health.
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