Study Partner Report of Apathy in Older Adults is Associated with AD Biomarkers: Findings from the Harvard Aging Brain Study
(2024) American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry — Vol. 32, n° 8, p. 909-919 (2024)
Files
StudyPartnerReportofApathyinOlderAdultsisAssociatedwithADBiomarkersFindingsfromtheHarvardAgingBrainStudy.pdf
Open Access - Adobe PDF
- 837.63 KB
Details
- Authors
- Abstract
- OBJECTIVES: We examined relationships between apathy (self and study-partner-reported) and markers of Alzheimer's disease (AD) in older adults. DESIGN: The study utilized a well-characterized sample of participants from the Harvard Aging Brain Study (HABS), a longitudinal cohort study. Participants were cognitively unimpaired without clinically significant neuropsychiatric symptoms at HABS baseline. The dependent variables, apathy evaluation scale-self (AES-S) and informant (AES-I), were administered cross-sectionally between years 6-9 and compared to the independent variables, amyloid and tau PET neuroimaging, from the same year. SETTING: Community-dwelling participants assessed at research visits in an academic medical center. PARTICIPANTS: Participants (n = 170) completed assessments within 1.5 years of their neuroimaging visit. At the time of apathy assessment, N = 156 were cognitively unimpaired and 14 had progressed to mild cognitive impairment (n = 8) or dementia (n = 6). MEASUREMENTS: We utilized linear regression models to assess cross-sectional associations of AES-S and AES-I with AD PET imaging measures (beta-amyloid (Pittsburgh Compound B) and tau (Flortaucipir)), covarying for age, sex, education, and the time between PET scan-apathy assessment. RESULTS: AES-I was significantly associated with beta-amyloid and temporal lobe tau, and the associations were retained after further adjusting for depressive symptoms. The associations between AES-S and AD biomarkers were not significant. In an exploratory subgroup analysis of cognitively unimpaired individuals with elevated Aβ, we observed an association between AES-I and inferior temporal tau. CONCLUSIONS: Study-partner-reported, but not self-reported, apathy in older adults is associated with AD pathology, and we observed this relationship starting from the preclinical stage. Our findings highlight the importance of collateral information in capturing AD-related apathy.
- Affiliations
Citations
Burling, J. E., Katz, Z., Yuan, Z., Munro, C., Mimmack, K., Ma, G., Hanseeuw, B., Papp, K. V., Amariglio, R. E., Vannini, P., Rentz, D. M., Quiroz, Y. T., Johnson, K. A., Sperling, R. A., Blacker, D., Marshall, G. A., Yang, H.-S., & Gatchel, J. R. (2024). Study Partner Report of Apathy in Older Adults is Associated with AD Biomarkers: Findings from the Harvard Aging Brain Study. American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, 32(8), 909-919. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jagp.2024.01.020 (Original work published 2024)