Retrograde Amnesia for Autobiographical Memories and Public Events in Mild and Moderate Alzheimer's Disease

Abstract

Patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease and normal controls were tested on two retrograde memory tests, one based on public events, and the other querying autobiographical memory. On both tests, patients showed strong decrements as compared to normal controls, pointing to retrograde amnesia. Evidence for a gradient in retrograde amnesia was conflicted, with analyses of variance revealing no gradient beyond the most recent period, and more sensitive analyses pointing to shallow Ribot gradients on both tests. A literature review shows that this is the case in most published studies. In autobiographical remote memory patients generated many incorrect answers, a tendency correlated with the number of false alarms on an anterograde memory test administered several months earlier. This suggests a stable, possibly executive, factor underlying memory errors.

We would like to thank neurologists Dr. Bas de Bruijn and Dr. Theo van Woerkom for their help in diagnostics and recruitment. We would also like to express our gratitude to the patients and their spouses for their willingness to participate in the study.

Notes

We would like to thank neurologists Dr. Bas de Bruijn and Dr. Theo van Woerkom for their help in diagnostics and recruitment. We would also like to express our gratitude to the patients and their spouses for their willingness to participate in the study.

*Excludes subsection on secondary schooling.

**Excludes 3 AD and 3 NC who did not complete the subsection on secondary schooling.

*Correlation significant at 0.05 level.

**Correlation significant at 0.01 level.

*included some patients with vascular dementia;

**for episodic, not semantic items;

***for semantic items, not episodic.

¹For each study we computed a correlation between the transformed performance of the AD group and period midpoint. All except two correlations were positive (i.e., performance was better for more remote periods), resulting in an average correlation of 0.73, different from 0. t(14) = 4.94, p < .001.

Murre, J.M.J., Chessa, A.G., & Meeter, M. (subm.). Quantitative modeling of amnesia: A unified account. Manuscript submitted for publication.