Affiliations: [a] Department of Epidemiology, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD, USA
| [b] Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research, Portland, OR, USA
| [c] Department of Medicine, University of Mississippi Medical Center, Jackson, MS, USA
| [d] Department of Radiology, Neurology, Psychiatry, and Neurosciences, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA
| [e] Department of Neurology, Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, Rochester, MN, USA
| [f] Department of Neurology, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA
Correspondence:
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Correspondence to: Rebecca F. Gottesman, MD, PhD, Departments of Neurology and Epidemiology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA. E-mail: [email protected].
Abstract: We examined associations between cognitive reserve and late-life amyloid-β deposition using florbetapir positron emission tomography (PET). We used data from the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) and ARIC-PET Study. 330 dementia-free participants underwent PET scans. Mean global cortical standardized uptake value ratio (SUVR) >1.2 was defined as elevated. Midlife cognition was significantly associated with late-life cognition, but not with late-life elevated SUVR; education was not associated with late-life SUVR, but was strongly associated with late-life cognition. Cognitive reserve may reduce dementia risk by mitigating the impact of Alzheimer’s disease pathology on the clinical expression of dementia, rather than by altering its pathogenesis.
Keywords: Amyloid, cohort study, education, epidemiology, human, PET imaging
