Tracy for their help with study coordination and data collection, as well as T. Verstynen for his help with the bootstrap regression analysis.
The antisaccade task has been used increasingly to study Alzheimer’s

disease (AD) because it provides a parsimonious hands- and language-free measure of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) function (Kaufman et al. 2010). In the antisaccade task, an eye movement must be directed in the opposite direction from a sudden onset peripheral target (Hallett 1978). Healthy individuals typically make antisaccade errors (looking toward the target) on 20% Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical of trials, while patients with AD make between 50% and 80% errors (Crawford et al. 2005; Garbutt et al. 2008). Previous studies have included, however, AD patients ranging from mild to severe levels of Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical dementia with mean Mini Mental Status Exam (MMSE) scores between 17 and 21(Currie et al. 1991; Shafiq–Antonacci et al. 2003; Crawford et al. 2005; Garbutt et al. 2008). Reports of a negative correlation between MMSE and antisaccade error rates (low

MMSE scores correspond with high error rates) (Currie et al. 1991; Shafiq–Antonacci et al. 2003) suggest that the inclusion of more severely demented patients may have exaggerated the differences in error rates between patients and controls. Our main objective was to determine whether mild AD patients (MMSE ≥17), make more errors than controls and if so whether error rates correlate with global selleck chemicals cognitive Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical measures. Methods HTS Participants Sixty-one participants, 30 Patients and 31 community-dwelling age-matched normal volunteers were drawn from the Sunnybrook Dementia Study, a large longitudinal clinical and multimodal imaging study of dementia (Table 1). Patients were diagnosed with probable Alzheimer’s Dementia using

the NINCDS-ADRDA criteria and the DSM-IV criteria for dementia. Patients with neurological or psychiatric conditions Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical or MMSE scores less than 17 were excluded. A cutoff score of <17 was chosen because 16 represent an inflection point whereby the slope of cognitive decline increases significantly (Feldman et al. 2001). All patients and controls completed an MMSE; additionally the Mattis Dementia Rating Scale (Mattis 1988) was obtained in 19 patients. All participants, or their designated substitute decision maker, provided informed consent for the study, which was approved by the Institutional Research Ethics Carfilzomib Board. Although the proportion of female and male participants was unequal between the groups, it is unlikely this affected error rates, as there is no published evidence for sex differences in antisaccade performance (Ettinger et al. 2005). Table 1 Demographics1. Saccade tasks The timing and stimulus of both the prosaccade task and the antisaccade task were identical, the tasks only differed in the instructions given to the participant prior to each block. Each participant first completed one block of prosaccades and then two blocks of antisaccades (24 pseudorandom trials per block) (Fig.