Appraisal of memory functioning and memory performance in healthy ageing and early-stage Alzheimer's disease.

BACKGROUND/AIMS: To compare memory evaluations in healthy older people and people with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and present standardised individual and dyadic methods for classifying degree of memory awareness in the participants with dementia.

METHODS

Cross-sectional study evaluating awareness of memory functioning and performance and providing normative data for healthy individuals and couples, together with comparison data from people with AD.

RESULTS

As a group, older people are reasonably accurate raters of their own memory functioning and performance, although considerable individual differences can be observed, and control dyads show good comparative accuracy. Comparing normative data from the control group to data from participants with AD confirms that significant overestimation is a frequent feature among people with dementia, with approximately two-thirds showing this pattern, although significant under-estimation is also reliably observed in a small proportion of people with dementia. Different types of measure elicit different profiles of memory awareness in participants with dementia.

CONCLUSION

Normative data from older individuals and couples provides useful percentile-based indices for determining level of memory awareness in people with dementia.