On 1 June, an international team of scientists published a statistical investigation on the estimated duration of stages in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) as a research article in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia. The study applied a multistate modelling approach on data from six cohorts that encompassed 3268 participants. The results showed that participants who received a diagnosis at 60 years of age had an overall disease duration of 24 years until death, while people diagnosed at the age of 80 had an overall disease duration of approximately 15 years. The model further estimated that participants who showed evidence of amyloid pathology (a biomarker for AD) but who did not show signs of cognitive impairment at the age of 70 would have an approximate disease duration of about 20 years.
Looking at the overall disease span by stage-duration, estimates showed that people with signs of amyloid pathology, but without mild cognitive impairment (preclinical AD), would take overall 10 years until they developed a form of mild cognitive impairment (prodromal AD). The potential subsequent “prodromal AD” (marked by amyloid pathology and mild cognitive impairment) phase, was estimated to continue for about 4 years until the beginning of dementia, which would continue for about 6 years until death. The researchers also reported that from their analysis, the male sex, clinical setting APOE 4 e4 allele carriership (a gene linked to AD), and abnormal cerebrospinal fluid tau were associated with a shorter disease duration until the point of death.
