Prediction of conversion to Alzheimer's disease with longitudinal measures and time-to-event data
"The growing public health threat posed by Alzheimer's disease has raised urgency to discover and assess prognostic markers for the early detection of the disease," says Sheng Luo, PhD, senior author of the report. "We assessed the comparative predictive utility of thirty-three longitudinal markers in determining the risk of AD conversion at future time points among individuals with MCI. We found that longitudinal measurements of common cognitive and functional tools can provide more accurate prediction regarding AD conversion than volumetric MRI markers for MCI patients, and markers would show different predictive values at different times in disease progression." The data used for this study was from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) study. It was very well suited for the tasks because of its large samples, long follow-up period, breadth of cognitive markers and biomarkers, and prospective nature. "We simultaneously modeled t...