Results from the Anti-Amyloid Treatment in Asymptomatic Alzheimer’s Disease (A4) study baseline assessments have identified that the Computerized Cognitive Composite (C3) battery has potential to serve as a proxy for paper and pencil measures in AD prevention trials. The C3 battery is composed of measures from the Cogstate Brief Battery, the Face Name Associative Memory Exam, and the Behavioral Pattern Separation Task-Object.
A paper summarizing the C3 battery findings in A4, published in The Journal of Prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease (JPAD) states that, “Computerized cognitive assessments have the potential to significantly reduce data administration and scoring errors, site burden, and cost in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) secondary prevention trials as cognitive screening tools and outcome measures.”
Cogstate’s Chief Science Officer, Dr. Paul Maruff, sat down virtually and chatted with the paper’s lead author, Dr. Kate Papp—a Neuropsychologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Assistant Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School. In the video below they cover a range of subjects including insights on the A4 study, the benefits of the C3 battery, data on the its ability to distinguish amyloid positivity, and important next steps in furthering this research.
Importantly, Dr. Papp noted that, “The approach we have taken with the C3 is analogous with the approach taken in the primary outcome, the PACC, which is a multidomain cognitive composite. What we did in this initial screening study was see if the C3 was operating at the same level as the PACC, the paper and pencil measures…The benefits of having a computerized battery is that a lot of the variability due to examiners and the means of data collection is eliminated when you have a computerized system that automatically captures data.
“We know these paper and pencil cognitive measures have been shown to be related to elevated amyloid, and we were interested to know if we could see the same type of relationship between amyloid and cognition using the purely computer-based measures… We found the effect size for the paper and pencil composite was close to the effect size we saw on the C3… I think this is really promising that this purely computerized battery is tapping into a cognitive functioning that is clinically relevant and at a comparable level to the gold standard measures.”
We invite you to watch the full interview below.
