Distinct Medical and Substance Use Histories Associate with Cognitive Decline in Alzheimer's Disease

This project aimed to determine if a patient's basic medical and substance use history could be relevant to their cognitive decline trajectory during a typical Alzheimer's Disease clinical trial. To answer this question, we used hierarchical clustering to partition patients with Alzheimer's Disease from the National Alzheimer's Coordinating Centers Database (NACC) into distinct subtypes. We also used linear mixed effects modeling to determine the effect of patient subtype on cognitive decline over a two-year follow-up period.

This project is currently published as a preprint at MedRxiv: https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.11.26.24317918

Access to data from the NACC can be requested at naccdata.org

All analyses were performed in R (version 4.3.1) and RStudio (version 2023.06.1+524)

doi for version 1.01: 10.5281/zenodo.14629554