Steven H FerrisNYU Langone Medical Center | NYUMC · Department of Psychiatry
Steven H Ferris
PhD
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396
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Publications
Publications (396)
Introduction:
There is an unmet need for effective methods for conducting dementia prevention trials.
Methods:
Home-based assessment study compared feasibility and efficiency, ability to capture change over time using in-home instruments, and ability to predict cognitive conversion using predefined triggers in a randomized clinical trial in (1)...
Introduction:
Little is known about factors affecting motivation and satisfaction of participants in dementia prevention trials.
Methods:
A Research Satisfaction Survey was administered to 422 nondemented older adults who participated in the Home-Based Assessment trial.
Results:
Overall satisfaction was high, with means of all individual items...
Background:
Subjective cognitive complaint is a sensitive marker of decline.
Objective:
This study aimed to (1) examine reliability of subjective cognitive complaint using the Cognitive Function Instrument (CFI), and (2) assess the utility of the CFI to detect cognitive decline in non-demented elders.
Methods:
Data from a four-year longitudina...
Background:
Genetic loci for Alzheimer's disease (AD) have been identified in whites of European ancestry, but the genetic architecture of AD among other populations is less understood.
Methods:
We conducted a transethnic genome-wide association study (GWAS) for late-onset AD in Stage 1 sample including whites of European Ancestry, African-Ameri...
IMPORTANCE: Mutations in known causal Alzheimer disease (AD) genes account for only 1% to 3%of patients and almost all are dominantly inherited. Recessive inheritance of complex phenotypes can be linked to long (>1-megabase [Mb]) runs of homozygosity (ROHs) detectable by single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) arrays. OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the associ...
Importance:
Early identification of Alzheimer disease (AD) is important for clinical management and affords the opportunity to assess potential disease-modifying agents in clinical trials. To our knowledge, this is the first report of a randomized trial to prospectively enrich a study population with prodromal AD (PDAD) defined by cerebrospinal fl...
Severe Impairment Battery (SIB) data from the 24-week, randomized, double-blind ACTivities of daily living and cognitION (ACTION) study suggest that patients with severe Alzheimer's disease (AD) benefit from treatment with 13.3 versus 4.6 mg/24 h rivastigmine patch. The objective of this retrospective analysis was to further examine the cognitive e...
Several large-scale Alzheimer disease (AD) secondary prevention trials have begun to target individuals at the preclinical stage. The success of these trials depends on validated outcome measures that are sensitive to early clinical progression in individuals who are initially asymptomatic.
To investigate the utility of the Cognitive Function Instr...
Post-mortem and imaging studies have observed that white matter (WM) degenerates in a pattern inverse to myelin development, suggesting preferential regional vulnerabilities influencing cognitive decline in AD. This study applied novel WM tract integrity (WMTI) metrics derived from diffusional kurtosis imaging (DKI) to examine WM tissue properties...
Recently, a rare variant in the amyloid precursor protein gene (APP) was described in a population from Iceland. This variant, in which alanine is replaced by threonine at position 673 (A673T), appears to protect against late-onset Alzheimer disease (AD). We evaluated the frequency of this variant in AD cases and cognitively normal controls to dete...
The Alzheimer's Disease Cooperative Study Prevention Instrument Project is a longitudinal study that recruited 644 cognitively healthy older subjects (aged between 75 and 93 years, 58% women) at baseline and evaluated their cognitive change over 4 years. The study was structured like a clinical trial to anticipate a prevention trial and to determin...
Neuropsychological and depression measures have been found to predict cognitive functioning. We compared these associations among whites and Spanish-speaking Hispanics.
Fifty-two pairs of whites and Hispanics were matched demographically and clinically in a cross-sectional study. Hierarchical regression analyses predicted Global Deterioration Scale...
Bapineuzumab, a humanized anti-amyloid-beta monoclonal antibody, is in clinical development for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease.
We conducted two double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled, phase 3 trials involving patients with mild-to-moderate Alzheimer's disease--one involving 1121 carriers of the apolipoprotein E (APOE) ε4 allele and the...
The Severe Impairment Battery (SIB) is validated for assessing cognition in patients with severe dementia. The current analysis aimed to further investigate the cognitive efficacy of rivastigmine capsules, as assessed by SIB factor scores, in patients with moderately severe-to-severe Alzheimer's disease (AD).
This was a retrospective analysis of a...
It was predicted that, due to the optical distortion produced by wearing a face mask, the constancy of visual position would not be maintained underwater, i.e., stationary objects should appear to move when the head is moved. Ss rotated their heads about a vertical axis and made magnitude estimates of object movement in both air and water. Twice as...
Recently published guidelines suggest that the most opportune time to treat individuals with Alzheimer's disease is during the preclinical phase of the disease. This is a phase when individuals are defined as clinically normal but exhibit evidence of amyloidosis, neurodegeneration and subtle cognitive/behavioral decline. While our standard cognitiv...
The Severe Impairment Battery (SIB), a reliable cognitive measure for evaluating treatment response in advanced Alzheimer's disease (AD), takes approximately 20 min to administer. A recently derived 8-item version of the SIB - the SIB-8 - which takes about 3 min to administer, may represent a more convenient tool for use in clinical practice. The c...
Alzheimer's disease is characterized by progressively worsening deficits in several cognitive domains, including language. Language impairment in Alzheimer's disease primarily occurs because of decline in semantic and pragmatic levels of language processing. Given the centrality of language to cognitive function, a number of language-specific scale...
Objective:
This study examined the impact of age and apolipoprotein E (APOE) genotype on the rate of cognitive decline in nondemented elderly participants in a simulated Alzheimer's disease (AD) primary prevention treatment trial carried out by the Alzheimer's Disease Cooperative Study.
Method:
Cognitive tests were administered at baseline and a...
Background and purpose:
Along with cortical abnormalities, white matter microstructural changes such as axonal loss and myelin breakdown are implicated in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer disease. Recently, a white matter model was introduced that relates non-Gaussian diffusional kurtosis imaging metrics to characteristics of white matter tract integ...
We report the first application of a novel diffusion-based MRI method, called diffusional kurtosis imaging (DKI), to investigate changes in brain tissue microstructure in patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and AD and in cognitively intact controls. The subject groups were characterized and compared in terms of DKI-derived metrics for sel...
Introduction
The US Food and Drug Administration approved a 23 mg daily dose of donepezil for treatment of moderate to severe Alzheimer's disease (AD) based on outcomes from a large trial comparing the 23 mg/day dose with the standard 10 mg/day dose. Results from this study indicated that after 24 weeks, donepezil 23 mg/day provided significant cog...
To assess differences in resource use and cost between older adults with and without mild cognitive impairment (MCI) over time.
Multicenter, longitudinal study.
Sixty-eight Alzheimer's Disease Cooperative Study (ADCS) sites in the United States.
Two hundred fifty-nine individuals diagnosed with MCI and 107 cognitively normal elderly adults followed...
The Relevant Outcome Scale for Alzheimer's disease (ROSA) is a novel, valid, and reliable instrument for multidimensional assessment of Alzheimer's disease (AD) symptoms across all severity stages. The ROSA and four standard instruments — the Alzheimer's disease Assessment Scale-cognitive (ADAS-cog), Severe Impairment Battery (SIB), Disability Asse...
This report describes the baseline experience of the multicenter, Home-Based Assessment study, designed to develop methods for dementia prevention trials using novel technologies for test administration and data collection. Nondemented individuals of 75 years of age or more were recruited and evaluated in-person using established clinical trial out...
Pancreatitis is a complex, progressively destructive inflammatory disorder. Alcohol was long thought to be the primary causative agent, but genetic contributions have been of interest since the discovery that rare PRSS1, CFTR and SPINK1 variants were associated with pancreatitis risk. We now report two associations at genome-wide significance ident...
When complex cognitive functions are measured with multi-item scales like the Alzheimer's Disease Assessment Scale - cognitive subscale (ADAS-cog), it seems valuable information can be lost due to combination of the ADAS-cog items results into a total score. We hypothesized, that an analysis of the results of different ADAS-cog item combinations ma...
The Relevant Outcome Scale for Alzheimer's Disease (ROSA) is a new observer rating instrument recently developed for routine medical practice. The validity and reliability of ROSA as well as sensitivity to changes due to intervention were examined in an open-label, single-arm, multicenter clinical study in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD).
Th...
Amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), characterized by episodic memory impairment in the absence of clinical dementia, often represents a transitional stage between normal aging and Alzheimer's disease (AD). It is not known if non-expert primary-care physicians (PCPs) can differentiate individuals with no cognitive impairment (NCI), aMCI and m...
Items in the SIB Language Subscale. A table listing the 24 items in the Severe Impairment Battery (SIB) language subscale.
Progressive language impairment is among the primary components of cognitive decline in Alzheimer's disease (AD). Because expressive and receptive language help to maintain emotional connections to caregivers and support the management of AD patients' functional needs, language plays a critical role in patients' emotional and physical health. Using...
The Alzheimer Disease Genetics Consortium (ADGC) performed a genome-wide association study of late-onset Alzheimer disease using a three-stage design consisting of a discovery stage (stage 1) and two replication stages (stages 2 and 3). Both joint analysis and meta-analysis approaches were used. We obtained genome-wide significant results at MS4A4A...
The aim of the study was to assess the clinical efficacy, safety, and disease-modification effects of tramiprosate (homotaurine, ALZHEMED(TM)) in mild-to-moderate Alzheimer's disease (AD).
Double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized trial in 67 clinical centres across North America. Patients aged ≥ 50 years, with mild-to-moderate AD (Mini-Mental S...
Summary“Staging methods have been applied to dementia for nearly 175 years. Currently, two different dementia staging procedures are widely used. These are the Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR) and the Global Deterioration Scale (GDS) Staging System. The latter include, in addition to the GDS staging, the Functional Assessment Staging (FAST) and the B...
The present review of Alzheimer's disease (AD) rating scales aims to outline the need for a new rating scale to be used in routine clinical practice for long-term medical care of AD patients. An ideal scale would be: 1) practical, easy and quick to administer for an experienced clinician; 2) validated for AD; 3) multi-domain: covering the AD-releva...
This report describes a pilot study to evaluate feasibility of new home-based assessment technologies applicable to clinical trials for prevention of cognitive loss and Alzheimer disease.
Community-dwelling nondemented individuals >or=75 years old were recruited and randomized to 1 of 3 assessment methodologies: (1) mail-in questionnaire/ live tele...
The Alzheimer's Disease Cooperative Study-Clinical Global Impression of Change (ADCS-CGIC) scale is widely used in Alzheimer trials. It assesses cognition, activities of daily living (ADLs), behavior and global functioning. To advance the understanding of relationships between the ADCS-CGIC and scores from other commonly used tools, this analysis i...
Among the major impediments to the design of clinical trials for the prevention of Alzheimer's disease (AD), the most critical is the lack of validated biomarkers, assessment tools, and algorithms that would facilitate identification of asymptomatic individuals with elevated risk who might be recruited as study volunteers. Thus, the Leon Thal Sympo...
Discusses the research surrounding age-associated memory impairment, including psychometric evidence, clinical significance, memory loss in other mammals, neuropathological and neurochemical studies, and the treatment or prevention of memory loss in later life.
Age-associated memory impairment is the proposed diagnostic term. Diagnostic inclusion...
Following a 48-week, double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial of donepezil in 821 patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), safety and tolerability of donepezil (10 mg) were further evaluated in a 28-week extension study. Of 499 participants who completed the double-blind phase, 145 enrolled in the open-label study. Adverse...
Evaluate the effect of sex and butyrylcholinesterase (BuChE) genotype on the incidence of Alzheimer's disease (AD), cognitive and functional decline, brain volume changes, and response to rivastigmine treatment in individuals with mild cognitive impairment (MCI).
This retrospective exploratory analysis from a 3-4 year, randomized, placebo-controlle...
Language impairment is one of the most troublesome manifestations of Alzheimer's disease (AD). The objective of this post hoc analysis was to assess the treatment effects of Memantine on language in patients with moderate to severe AD, using the recently developed Severe Impairment Battery-Language (SIB-L) scale.
From a combined database including...
Communication problems are common in Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients, but instruments to assess these symptoms are limited. Our objective was to create a new scale, based on the language subscale of the Severe Impairment Battery (SIB), as a sensitive and reliable measurement of treatment effects on language performance.
All 24 items of the SIB la...
Epidemiologic studies have identified several demographic factors, including gender, that may influence the progression from mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to Alzheimer's disease (AD).
This analysis aimed to develop a sensitive model for detecting treatment benefits in patients with MCI by controlling for factors that predict progression to AD. Th...
The Alzheimer's Disease Cooperative Study-Clinical Global Impression of Change (ADCS-CGIC) was modified for use in mild cognitive impairment (MCI) trials and tested in the ADCS MCI randomized clinical trial of donepezil, vitamin E, and placebo. We assessed feasibility for its use by determining whether or not: (1) it distinguished a medication effe...
The efficacy, safety and disease-modification of tramiprosate (homotaurine)were investigated in a recently completed large-scale Phase III clinical study in patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease (AD), the Alphase study. Disease-modification was assessed using longitudinal volumetric MRI (vMRI) measurements of the hippocampus in a subgr...
Treatment of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) with cholinesterase inhibitors may improve symptoms.
In this multicenter, randomized, placebo-controlled trial, subjects with MCI entered a 3-week placebo run-in period followed by 48 weeks of double-blind donepezil (5 mg/day for 6 weeks, then 10 mg/day for 42 weeks) or placebo treatment. Primary efficac...
Disease-specific assessments are not currently available for patients with Parkinson's disease dementia (PDD). This study evaluated the criterion-related validity and test-retest reliability of the Alzheimer's Disease Assessment scale cognitive subscale (ADAS-cog) in terms of sensitivity for differentiation between mild and moderate severity impair...
This document proposes an array of recommendations for a National Plan of Action to accelerate the discovery and development of therapies to delay or prevent the onset of disabling symptoms of Alzheimer's disease. A number of key scientific and public-policy needs identified in this document will be incorporated by the Alzheimer Study Group into a...
The purpose of the Alzheimer's Association Research Roundtable meeting was to discuss the potential of finding diagnostic tools to determine the earliest risk factors for Alzheimer's disease (AD). Currently, drugs approved for AD address symptoms which are generally manifest after the disease is already well-established, but there is a growing pipe...
The neuropsychologic test battery from the Uniform Data Set (UDS) of the Alzheimer's Disease Centers (ADC) program of the National Institute on Aging consists of brief measures of attention, processing speed, executive function, episodic memory, and language. This paper describes development of the battery and preliminary data from the initial UDS...
To characterize age-related MR diffusion patterns of the prefrontal brain cortex microstructure using a new method for investigating the non-Gaussian behavior of water diffusion called diffusional kurtosis imaging (DKI).
Measures of mean diffusivity (MD), fractional anisotropy (FA) and mean kurtosis (MK) were compared in the prefrontal brain cortex...
To the Editor: In their study of guest authorship and ghostwriting of publications related to rofecoxib, Dr Ross and colleagues1 selected an article by Thal et al2 as their primary example of an apparently guest-authored clinical trial publication. Guest authorship was inferred because (1) an early draft identified as part of rofecoxib litigation i...
