Alzheimer’s disease and its precursor, mild cognitive impairment, appear to be associated with an increased risk of death among both white and African American older adults according to a new, long-term research study by neurological experts at the Alzheimer’s Disease Center at Rush University Medical Center.
The study findings are published in the June issue of Archives of Neurology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
Data from two earlier national surveys have suggested that life expectancy among patients with Alzheimer’s disease may be greater for African Americans than for whites, according to Robert Wilson, PhD, a neuropsychologist at the Alzheimer’s Disease Center at Rush and the study’s lead author.
“In these surveys, the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease is not based on a uniform clinical evaluation but derived from medical records, which increases the likelihood of substantial variation in the quality of diagnostic classifications,” said Wilson.
However, the results from this study show that the presence and severity of mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s disease are associated with reduced survival among African Americans and these effects are comparable to those seen among…
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