THE IUM-TO-ESTABLISH-A-REGISTRY-FOR-ALZHEIMERS-DISEASE (CERAD) .5. A NORMATIVE STUDY OF THE NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL BATTERY

The neuropsychological tests developed for the Consortium to Establish a Registry for Alzheimer's Disease (CERAD) are currently used to meas ure cognitive impairments of Alzheimer's disease (AD) in clinical inve stigations of this disorder. This report presents the normative inform ation for the CERAD battery, obtained in a large sample (n = 413) of c ontrol subjects (ages 50 to 89) who were enrolled in 23 university med ical centers in the United States participating in the CERAD study fro m 1987 to 1992. We compared separately the performance of subjects wit h high (112) and low (<12) years of formal education. For many of the individual cognitive measures in the highly educated group, we observe d significant age and gender effects. Only the praxis measure showed a significant age effect in the low-education group. Delayed recall, wh en adjusted for amount of material acquired (savings), was relatively unaffected by age, gender, and level of education. Our findings sugges t that the savings scores, in particular, may be useful in distinguish ing between AD and normal aging.