TY - JOUR T1 - A highly predictive signature of cognition and brain atrophy for progression to Alzheimer’s dementia JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/352344 SP - 352344 AU - Angela Tam AU - Christian Dansereau AU - Yasser Itturia-Medina AU - Sebastian Urchs AU - Pierre Orban AU - Hanad Sharmarke AU - John Breitner AU - Pierre Bellec AU - for the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative Y1 - 2018/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/10/09/352344.abstract N2 - Patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) are at risk of progressing to Alzheimer’s dementia, yet only a fraction of them do. We explore here whether a very high-risk MCI subgroup can be identified using cognitive assessments and structural neuroimaging. A multimodal signature of Alzheimer’s dementia was first extracted using machine learning tools in the ADNI1 sample, and was comprised of cognitive deficits across multiple domains as well as atrophy in temporal, parietal and occipital regions. We then validated the predictive value of this signature on two MCI cohorts. In ADNI1 (N=235), the presence of the signature predicted progression to dementia over three years with 80.4% positive predictive value, adjusted for a “typical” MCI baseline rate of 33% (95.6% specificity, 55.1% sensitivity). These results were replicated in ADNI2 (N=235), with 87.8% adjusted positive predictive value (96.7% specificity, 47.3% sensitivity). Our results demonstrate that, even for widely used markers, marked improvement in positive predictive value over the literature can be achieved by focusing on a subgroup of individuals with similar brain characteristics. The signature can be readily applied for the enrichment of clinical trials. ER -