Confirmatory factor analysis of the ADNI neuropsychological battery

Abstract

The Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) is a large multi-center study designed to develop optimized methods for acquiring longitudinal neuroimaging, cognitive, and biomarker measures of AD progression in a large cohort of patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), patients with mild cognitive impairment, and healthy controls. Detailed neuropsychological testing was conducted on all participants. We examined the factor structure of the ADNI Neuropsychological Battery across older adults with differing levels of clinical AD severity based on the Clinical Dementia Rating Scale (CDR). Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) of 23 variables from 10 neuropsychological tests resulted in five factors (memory, language, visuospatial functioning, attention, and executive function/processing speed) that were invariant across levels of cognitive impairment. Thus, these five factors can be used as valid indicators of cognitive function in older adults who are participants in ADNI.

Factor structure of the ARIC-NCS Neuropsychological Battery: An evaluation of invariance across vascular factors and demographic characteristics.

“…The battery of tests administered in ARIC-NCS is consistent with other large-scale studies, which provides for comparability across studies (Hayden, Jones, et al, 2011; Park et al, 2012; Siedlecki et al, 2008). Additionally, the use of full information maximum likelihood in the CFA analyses allowed us to include all participants.…”

“…It is important to determine if the underlying factors measured by cognitive tests are similar (invariant) across subgroups to ensure that observed variability in cognitive performance in different groups can be appropriately attributed to underlying cognitive abilities rather than to differences in the meaning of the tests. Such invariance analyses by demographics and cognitive status are important to establish and are commonly conducted (Hayden, Reed, et al, 2011; Mungas, Widaman, Reed, & Tomaszewski Farias, 2011; Park et al, 2012; Siedlecki, Honig, & Stern, 2008). Additionally, studies have examined invariance by genetic risk factors for Alzheimer's disease (AD) (Dowling, Hermann, La Rue, & Sager, 2010) with invariance among tests often varying by genetic risk factors in populations and by subgroups.…”

A quantitative meta-analysis of neurocognitive functioning in posttraumatic stress disorder.

“…Processing speed may have been relatively ignored previously because authors have often classified these tests (e.g., Trail making Test, Part A; WAIS Digit Symbol) as assessing attention. While attention deficits can contribute to slower processing speed and the two constructs exhibit functional anatomical overlap, factor analytic studies support the separation of speed of information processing from attention in both healthy persons (e.g., Tulsky & Price, 2003) and those with neurological or neuropsychiatric illness (e.g., Park et al, 2012; Schretlen et al, 2013). Interestingly, we found processing speed to have the second largest effect size discrepancy of any domain between individuals with PTSD and healthy comparison groups.…”

Application of Latent Variable Methods to the Study of Cognitive Decline When Tests Change over Time

“…We acknowledge here the assumption that tests change at a similar rate; such longitudinal invariance has been demonstrated in several other studies using similar cognitive test batteries. (16,17) This assumption was necessary given the structural missingness across study visits. We repeated this procedure for the domains: executive functioning/processing speed (using Digit Symbol, Trail Making Test parts A and B at the 2011–13 visit), memory (using delayed word recall, logical memory, incidental learning at the 2011–13 visit), and language (using phonemic and semantic fluency, Boston Naming at the 2011–13 visit).…”