A Comparative Study on the Working Memory of the Children of Parents With and Without Alzheimer's Disease

Objectives Considering the increasing need for finding diagnostic criteria to help reliably predict Alzheimer's disease (AD) and given that neuropathological changes occur in brain areas, especially temporal areas, before the onset of AD clinical symptoms, and there is a functional relationship between these regions and the cognitive functions including spatial working memory (SWM), pattern recognition memory (PRM), and paired associates learning (PAL), this study aims to investigate these three functions in the children of parents with AD and healthy parents. Methods This is a comparative study. The statistical population consists of the children of parents aged 30-55 years referred to a neurology clinic in Tehran, Iran, in 2022. Of these, 55 children were selected using a convenience sampling method; 31 were the children of AD parents and 24 were the children of healthy parents. They were evaluated using three tests from the Cambridge neuropsychological test automated battery (CANTAB), including SWM, PRM, and PAL. The data were analyzed in SPSS software using independent t-test and Mann-Whitney U test. Results Regarding the SWM performance, there were significant differences in the items of between errors (control group: 14.21±12.21; AD group: 34.58±22.69) and total errors (control group: 12.96±9.3; AD group: 37.03±22.22) between the two groups (P<0.01). Regarding the PRM performance, there were significant differences between the two groups in two items of mean latency (control group: 1917.17±364.03; AD group: 2186.94±445.15, P=0.020) and percent correct (control group: 96.33±4.44; AD group: 84.39±8.93; P=0.001). There were no significant differences in the mean correct and incorrect latencies in the PRM test (P>0.05). Regarding the PAL performance, there were significant differences in all three items of first trial memory score (control group: 23.08±1.59; AD group: 17.65±4.32), mean errors to success (control group: 0.54±0.36; AD group: 2.31±1.83), and total errors (control group: 4.54±2.87; AD group: 17.10±1.83) between the two groups (P<0.01). Conclusion The PAL, PRM, and SWM of the children of AD and non-AD parents are different which may be considered as the indicators of AD.