J M Starr

..28, p < 0.05). There was no increased incidence of other vascular disease or bronchogenic carcinoma in cases' parents compared with control individuals' parents...

..Future trials of the effects of antihypertensive therapy on cognition should focus more on outcomes other than memory. Early differential effects of therapeutic agents may not be maintained...

..To compare brain activity identified by fMRI in subjects with Alzheimer disease (AD) and older healthy controls (HCs) performing an episodic/working memory (EWM) and semantic memory (SM) task...

..To determine the association between prescribed medication and life long changes in cognitive ability...

..Participants were followed up in 1994-5, 1997-8 and in this fourth wave of the project, 1999-2000, to determine key predictors of, and associations with successful ageing...

..to examine risk factors for patients becoming Clostridium difficile culture and toxin positive...

..These data confirm the adverse effect of smoking on information processing speed, and provide new evidence for a similar adverse effect on memory for people in their mid-sixties...

..To determine the extent to which correlates of edentulism are explained by an association between tooth loss and cognitive ability...

..To investigate the relations between premorbid and current mental ability, mood, and white matter signal abnormalities detected by T2 weighted brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and impairment of balance and mobility in older adults...

..40-1.40). Other forms of vascular disease in parents were not associated with significant risk either (OR 0.93, 95% CI 0.51-1.68). We conclude that familial factors do not contribute substantially to risk in most cases of PICH...

..60, p = 0.001) and with a general cognitive factor extracted from the mental ability test scores (r = -0.42, p = 0.016). We conclude that informant-rated methods offer a promising approach to measuring cognitive decline after stroke...

..13 shared great-grandmothers for dementia cases. Case-kinship is 2.35 more than expected (estimated range 1.84-3.18). We conclude that familial factors contribute to the incidence of dementia in Lanarkshire...

..Behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSDs) are common. It is unclear whether associations are stronger with the absolute cognitive level or that relative to premorbid mental ability...

..This review examines recent evidence for this hypothesis and also considers other possible causal mechanisms for the observed relationship between blood pressure and mental ability...

..difficile epidemiology. This is illustrated by a reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo model based on the herd immunity hypothesis of C. difficile outbreaks...

..All results are also presented so that they are valuable for future meta-analyses of candidate genes for cognition...

..Our results therefore support involvement of the dysbindin gene in cognitive function, but further work is needed to clarify the specific functional variants involved and the cognitive abilities with which they are associated...

..04) in the analysis not controlling for IQ. Neither of these tests was significant when a correction for multiple testing was applied. APOE e4 does not influence memory abilities in a normal population of 70-year-olds...

..To investigate the association between caffeine consumption and cognitive outcomes in later life...

..Blood inflammatory markers have been shown to predict late-life cognition, although the mechanism through which this occurs is unknown...

..To test the hypothesis that white matter integrity, as measured by diffusion tensor and magnetization transfer MRI is significantly associated with cognitive ability measured in youth and old age...

..CONCLUSION: In this 1921 birth cohort, social class and birth weight have independent effects on cognitive function at age 11. Future research will relate these childhood data to health and cognition in old age...

..This study indicates that BDNF genotype contributes to age-related changes in reasoning skills, which are closely related to general intelligence...

..05): The correlation between childhood ability and speed was lower in e4 allele carriers. APOE has an influence on nonverbal cognition in old age and interacts with childhood IQ to influence processing speed...

..Therefore, COMT genotype may contribute to differences in normal cognitive aging and to differences in some of the major personality traits in old age...

..In this sample, smoking makes a small (<1% variance) independent negative contribution to cognitive aging...

..We sought to characterise user-defined health status in a sample of older adults with ID...

..Psychiatric symptoms of perceptual disturbance--such as hallucinations, illusions and misperceptions--are common in delirium, suggesting that patients may have deficits in the cognitive systems underlying visual perception...

..63, p < 0.001) and without (r = 0.60, p < 0.001) dementia. These findings validate the NART as an estimator of premorbid ability in mild to moderate dementia...

..We investigated differential effects of premorbid cognitive ability on dementia subtypes to clarify which causal pathway was predominant...

..When statistical models that include childhood adversity are tested, these attenuate and sometimes remove the contribution of IQ to morbidity and premature death...

..To test whether socio-economic status and disease burden influence blood pressure in older adults...

..Non-pathological cognitive ageing is a distressing condition affecting an increasing number of people in our 'ageing society'. Oxidative stress is hypothesised to have a major role in cellular ageing, including brain ageing...

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..Executive function may be the cognitive domain most sensitive to age-related decline in white matter tract integrity...

..Simulation of different interventions indicates that for the same effect size, reducing patient susceptibility to infection is more effective in reducing the number of CDAD cases than lowering transmission rates...

..CONCLUSIONS: In healthy older men, higher plasma cortisol levels are associated with worse ageing-related overall cognitive change but not ageing-related brain atrophy...

..In future studies, it is important to consider other pathways which may account for variance in the link between childhood IQ and health in later life...

..These data identify a candidate gene, highlight the genetic overlap between schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression, and suggest that rare coding variants may contribute significantly to risk of these disorders...

..17, p=0.022) adjustment for mental ability at age 11. This might be a type 1 error. Otherwise, we find that telomere length in old age does not have a significant association with age-related physical and cognitive decline or mortality...

..The PD group had a significantly lower mean score on the ITloop task than did controls (P=0.02). PD patients perform more poorly on temporal order discrimination judgements even when the task makes no motor demands...

..Thus, possession of the APOE E4 allele may not only predispose to Alzheimer's disease, but also appears to be a risk factor for non-pathological decline in verbal memory and abstract reasoning in the ninth decade of life...

..034 and 0.043, respectively). Women homozygous for the Cys allele had significantly lower cognitive ability scores than men at age 79, p = 0.003. Variation in DISC1 may therefore affect cognitive aging especially in women...

..It is not known whether the extent of EPVS is also associated with cognitive function. We tested the hypothesis that more EPVS would be associated with worse cognitive function...

..01, P=0.57), indicating that this SNP set was not associated with general cognitive ability in the populations studied...

..To investigate the relationship between features of the MMSE written sentence and cognitive function, depression and disability...

..Its effect on the subsequent course of AD is less clear. Pre-morbid IQ is a useful measure of cognitive reserve...

..Reference ranges are available for different blood cell counts. These ranges treat each cell type independently and do not consider possible correlations between cell types...

..Carotid intima-media thickness (CIMT) is a noninvasive measure of atherosclerosis, but it is unclear whether it is a stronger risk factor for large vessel disease or small vessel disease...

..We investigated whether there was an association between birth parameters and imaging markers of white matter integrity in community-dwelling older people...

..The data did suggest that risk of cognitive decline is greater when Pro12Ala carriers contract diabetes...

..A limitation of many studies is the lack of a sufficiently long period between cognitive assessments to examine determinants. Here, the aim is to examine influences on cognitive ageing between childhood and old age...

..Further studies should investigate whether these findings relate more to the role of tract integrity and information processing speed in nonpathological cognitive aging or in lifelong-stable processes...

..16 x 10(-30)), KNG1 (rs710446, combined p = 9.52 x 10(-22)), and HRG (rs9898, combined p = 1.34 x 10(-11)). These three SNPs explain approximately 18% of phenotypic variance in aPTT in the Lothian Birth Cohorts...

..Childhood intelligence predicts mortality throughout most of the life span. However, it is unknown whether its effect persists into advanced old age...

..Though the extent of leakage was no greater than that of non-demented people of a similar age in this small sample, the temporal pattern differed, indicating different blood-brain-CSF compartmental kinetics...

..However, an association between brain size and intelligence may be due to the persistence of this relationship from earlier life...

..To review peer-reviewed, original research studies published in 2008-2009 that present data relating to the predictors and correlates of edentulism and tooth loss in older adults...

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..There is growing appreciation that factors affecting general bodily ageing also influence cognitive functions in old age...

..A common exercise regimen employed to attenuate functional decline and disability has been resistance strength training. However, recent evidence suggests that functional tasks exercise may be more effective in preventing disability...

..No SNPs withstood the correction to significance level for multiple testing. Nevertheless, the results will be of importance to future meta-analyses of these candidate genes in relation to psychological distress and personality...

..Inspection time, the marker that was least dependent on childhood intelligence, should be considered further as one biomarker of cognitive aging...

..Birth weight throughout the normal range correlates with cognitive ability in childhood. Some studies suggest this may persist into adulthood, but it is unclear whether this continues into old age...

..Longitudinal studies in which mental ability earlier in life is known are needed to clarify the relationship...

..91) and rs846910-A/G (p=.90) between the groups. We conclude that these variants in HSD11B1 are not significant contributors to the range of cognitive ageing examined here...

..Studies in animals suggest that the limbic prefrontal cortex, including the anterior cingulate cortex, is involved in regulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, but human data are lacking...

..To test the hypothesis that physical fitness is associated with more successful cognitive aging...

..The possibility that this result might be a selection effect was not supported by the samples being in Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium with respect to the distribution of NCSTN genotypes...

..Parental social class accounted for a larger proportion of the variance than birth weight, and these 2 variables were largely independent...

..Telomere shortening in peripheral blood leukocytes is a promising index of ischemic heart disease risk in older people and deserves further investigation as a potential mechanism...

..Total cerebellar volumes correlated significantly with a test of nonverbal reasoning (r=.030, p=.42). These findings suggest a specific association of neocerebellar vermis size with variations in cognitive ability in older adults...

..Neither nonverbal reasoning nor verbal fluency were affected. In this sample, APOE genotype contributed to verbal memory in old age...

..CONCLUSIONS: The association between hypertension and lower cognitive function in adulthood is partly accounted for by individual differences in childhood IQ...

..However, current progress in genetic knowledge, technology and informatics will contribute to progress in this important area...

..This effect of the APOE epsilon 4 allele on normal cognitive ageing may be mediated by a mechanism that is at least partly independent of its predisposing effect towards Alzheimer's disease...

..Oxidative stress may explain, at least in part, associations between telomere shortening and physiological aging...

..9 (95% C.I. 34.3-35.5), and Met/Met 34.9 (95% C.I. 34.1-35.8). This study adds to the evidence that the Val/Val polymorphism has a detrimental effect on cognition, extending upwards the age range in which such an effect has been detected...

..There were, however, no significant associations of CETP genotype with either childhood IQ or current cognitive function in old age, or with lifetime change in cognitive function...

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..Variation in the KLOTHO gene is a possible contributor to life-long reasoning differences in humans and/or to the ageing of non-verbal reasoning, especially in women...

..It did not. Higher intelligence from early life was apparently protective of intelligence in old age due to the stability of cognitive function across the lifespan, rather than because it slowed the decline experienced in later life...

..Here, we evaluated the effects of early-life IQ on mental and physical health outcomes at age 70, in the context of effects of SES...

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..Brain size and intracranial capacity are correlated with cognitive performance in young healthy adults, but data are lacking on these relationships in older healthy adults...

..Increased permeability of the BBB might account for some of the cerebral effects of type II diabetes, and so possibly also for the effect of other conditions that affect the microvasculature (like hypertension), on the brain...

..An interaction between PRNP and klotho (KL) genotypes was also identified (p=0.015), highlighting the importance of analysing gene interactions when investigating associations with quantitative traits...

..02), which could indicate that this gene is under selection. Polymorphisms at the two studied genes are unlikely to be risk factors for normal cognitive ageing...

..The relative preservation of complex reasoning skills in old age may be associated with the preservation of the neural networks that underpin fundamental information processing in youth...

..Lower childhood IQ may contribute to coping less well with later life. Lower QoL is not an invariable concomitant of mild cognitive decline...

..This inconsistency may arise because the relation is present only in the absence of the apolipoprotein E epsilon4 (APOE epsilon4) allele...

..The cognitive reserve hypothesis conforms with reported associations between early and mid life lifestyle choices, early education, lifelong dietary habit, leisure pursuits and the retention of late life mental ability...

..The direct-weighted Schedule for the Evaluation of Individual Quality of Life, Direct Weighting (SEIQoL-DW) is an individualised measure of QoL that has been little used in very elderly people...

..54, p < 0.001) and the number of drugs (rho = 0.55, p < 0.001). Further studies using such user-led assessments are needed to assess whether they can have a wider application...

..These novel results suggest, that MR imaging studies of white matter structure and its relationship to mental ability in ageing should control for early life cognition...

..Food supplement use is widely promoted, but little is known about the cognitive effects of food supplements...