Dementia status at death for each respondent was determined based on interviews/assessments during the last years of the respondent’s life. This included using the full Geriatric Mental State-Automated Geriatric Examination for Computer Assisted Taxonomy diagnostic algorithm, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (third edition-revised), interviews with the informants after the respondent’s death and the cause of death. Respondents were assessed as having no dementia at death if they had not been identified with dementia at their last interview less than 6 months before death or if they did not have dementia identified at the last interview and the retrospective interview showed no dementia at death. Bayesian analysis was used to estimate the probability of dementia when the last interviews were more than 6 months before death, and no record of having dementia at the interview and no retrospective informant interview (RINI) [5 (link), 33 (link)]. A total of 107 of the 186 subjects had a diagnosis of dementia, which represented approximately 58% of the cohort. Of these 107 cases, 72 were women and 35 were men; their median ages were 89 and 88, respectively. There was a balanced gender ratio (37 females and 33 males) for participants dying without dementia (median age 85 and 79, respectively). The Consortium to Establish a Registry for Alzheimer’s disease (CERAD) criterion determined that in 64 out of the 107 cases (60.0%), Alzheimer’s disease was the definite, probable or possible cause of the observed symptoms.
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