Paquid is an epidemiological study designed to gather and follow-up a cohort of 3,777 elderly subjects (65 years and older) living at home. In order to study normal and pathological brain ageing, these subjects were randomly chosen in the general population of 75 communities of Gironde and Dordogne, two administrative areas of South-Western France. The subjects were interviewed at home by trained psychologists and followed-up with the same procedure at 1,3 and 5 years after the initial data collection. The identification of the demented cases is made with a two-stage design: the first stage is a systematic screening by the psychologists with application of the DSM-IIIR criteria and the second stage consists in a confirmation of the diagnosis by a neurologist according to the NINCDS-ADRDA criteria. Paquid is complemented by the study of a random sample of 357 subjects riving in institutions in Gironde.

We confirmed an association between marital status and AD, with an excess risk observed among never-married individuals. This association may provide clues about the pathogenesis of AD.

In this large sample of prevalent PD patients and population-matched controls, PD significantly aggregates in families, with the strength of the association being age-dependent. Therefore, familial factors, which can be genetic, environmental, or both, play a role in PD.

PAQUID is an epidemiologic prospective study of mental and functional aging. A sample of 4,050 community-dwelling individuals, aged 65 and over, was randomly selected from electoral lists of 37 parishes of Gironde after stratification by age, sex, and size of urban unit; 68.9 percent agreed to participate. Baseline information was obtained from a one-hour home interview. Health measures included ADL, IADL, mobility, Rosow scale, and two subjective health assessments. Depressive symptomatology was assessed by the CES-D scale and cognitive functioning by Folstein's MMS. Dependence rates vary from 9.7 percent to 71.9 percent according to the indicator under consideration. Cross-sectional correlations with dependence are significant for age, sex, education, rural setting, joint pain, dyspnea, hearing and visual impairment, MMS score, and depression. In logistic regressions, only dyspnea, MMS score, and depression are always significantly correlated with dependence, whichever the indicator.

We examined the frequency of dementia and depressive symptomatology in 60 Parkinson's disease (PD) patients, identified in a large representative sample of the population, aged 65 years and older, living at home or in institutions in Gironde, France. Dementia, diagnosed according to DSM-III-R criteria, was present in 17.6%, and depressive symptomatology, assessed by the Center for Epidemiologic Studies-Depression Scale, was present in 32.7%. The frequency of dementia in PD increased strongly with age and was higher in institutionalized PD patients than in those living at home. PD was significantly associated with dementia for individuals living at home (odds ratio = 8.2, adjusted for age and symptoms of depression.

We studied the association between smoking and Parkinson's disease (PD) through a case-control study. Several studies have shown an inverse association between smoking and PD. This association has been interpreted as spurious by some investigators, and as real and causal by others. Several other studies did not confirm the inverse association. We included 193 prevalent cases of PD ascertained in five European prevalence surveys that followed a two-phase design of screening and clinical examination. Each case was matched by center, age (+/- 2 years), and gender to three control subjects drawn from the same populations (N = 579). Information on smoking was obtained through direct or proxy interview. Overall, there was no association between ever smoking and PD (odds ratio = 1.1; p = 0.6). Analyses stratified by age showed that ever smoking was associated with a decreased risk of PD in the younger individuals (odds ratio = 0.4; p = 0.03) and with a significant trend of increasing risk with advancing age (p = 0.003). The risk of PD in relation to smoking is strongly modified by age; smoking may be protective in the younger cases but not in the older cases. This finding may explain the conflicting results from previous studies.

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These results suggest that treatment with EGb 761 may increase the probability of survival in the elderly population. These findings need to be corroborated and further assessed using randomized, controlled trials.