TY  - JOUR
AU  - Ding, Huitong
AU  - An, Ning
AU  - Au, Rhoda
AU  - Devine, Sherral
AU  - Auerbach, Sanford H
AU  - Massaro, Joseph
AU  - Joshi, Prajakta
AU  - Liu, Xue
AU  - Liu, Yulin
AU  - Mahon, Elizabeth
AU  - Ang, Ting FA
AU  - Lin, Honghuang
PY  - 2020
DA  - 2020/4/23
TI  - Exploring the Hierarchical Influence of Cognitive Functions for Alzheimer Disease: The Framingham Heart Study
JO  - J Med Internet Res
SP  - e15376
VL  - 22
IS  - 4
KW  - Alzheimer disease
KW  - neuropsychological test
KW  - stratification
KW  - Bayesian network
KW  - clustering
AB  - Background: Although some neuropsychological (NP) tests are considered more central for the diagnosis of Alzheimer disease (AD), there is a lack of understanding about the interaction between different cognitive tests. Objective: This study aimed to demonstrate a global view of hierarchical probabilistic dependencies between NP tests and the likelihood of cognitive impairment to assist physicians in recognizing AD precursors. Methods: Our study included 2091 participants from the Framingham Heart Study. These participants had undergone a variety of NP tests, including Wechsler Memory Scale, Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, and Boston Naming Test. Heterogeneous cognitive Bayesian networks were developed to understand the relationship between NP tests and the cognitive status. The performance of probabilistic inference was evaluated by the 10-fold cross validation. Results: A total of 4512 NP tests were used to build the Bayesian network for the dementia diagnosis. The network demonstrated conditional dependency between different cognitive functions that precede the development of dementia. The prediction model reached an accuracy of 82.24%, with sensitivity of 63.98% and specificity of 92.74%. This probabilistic diagnostic system can also be applied to participants that exhibit more heterogeneous profiles or with missing responses for some NP tests. Conclusions: We developed a probabilistic dependency network for AD diagnosis from 11 NP tests. Our study revealed important psychological functional segregations and precursor evidence of AD development and heterogeneity. 
SN  - 1438-8871
UR  - http://www.jmir.org/2020/4/e15376/
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2196/15376
UR  - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32324139
DO  - 10.2196/15376
ID  - info:doi/10.2196/15376
ER  -