Poster Presentations

Session Title: Apolipoprotein-E
Presentation Date: Thursday, March 12 – Friday, March 13 ,2009

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN RISK FACTORS FOR AD AND SERIAL POSITION EFFECTS

N. Pomara¹, A. Schmeltz², J. Sidtis^1
1Nathan Kline Institute/NYU School of Medicine, Psychiatry, Orangeburg, United States, ²Nathan Kline Institute, Geriatric Psychiatry, Orangeburg, United States

The serial position effect is a phenomenon in which immediate recall of items at the end (recency) and beginning of a word list (primacy) is better than for mid-list items. Persons with Alzheimer's disease (AD) show disproportionate recency effects and a loss of primacy effects that are thought to reflect distinct memory systems disrupted by hippocampal lesions. Aging, female sex, and the e4-allele are established risk factors for AD. We examined if these factors produced changes in serial position in cognitively intact adults similar to those found in AD. All subjects (n=383; 151 males, mean age 69.97 + 7.76 yrs; 232 females, 68.28 + 8.73 yrs) had MMSE scores between 28-30 and were administered the Auditory Verbal Learning Test (AVLT). The sub-group of subjects with APOE genotyping consisted of 229 subjects, 161 e4 negative (69.73 + 8.85 yrs) and 68 e4 positive (69.43 + 8.57 yrs).
An ANOVA examining the effects of position, e4, decade and sex revealed significant serial position effects in each age group. Age and sex effects tended to occur in the middle positions where recall tended to be lower. Age effects also occurred at the initial position. With respect to e4, the youngest e4 positive group had better performance across most serial positions, but this e4 effect reversed with increasing age such that the e4 positive group became worse than the e4 negative group with age. The presence of e4 does not produce AD-like changes in serial position in aging normal subjects.