Apolipoprotein E and cognitive decline in Alzheimer's disease

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Abstract
Three articles in this issue [1-3] address this topic. Contrary to such a prediction, all three studies report that AD patients with epsilon 4 do not show faster cognitive or functional decline than patients without epsilon 4. The clinical series of Growdon et al. [1] and Kurz et al. [3] also failed to replicate the common observation of differences in onset with various APOE genotypes. Although this latter finding may in part reflect limited sample size, it also highlights the difficulties commonly encountered when studying ``population'' characteristics in self-referred clinic samples. To study disease progression, Growdon et al. [1] and Kurz et al. [3] monitored performance on several psychometric measures of cognitive and functional abilities for up to 5.5 years. Growdon et al. estimated that APOE genotype accounted for less …