P4‐246: ASSESSMENT OF SUBJECTIVE MEMORY ABILITY IN MILD COGNITIVE IMPAIRMENT AND SUBJECTIVE COGNITIVE DECLINE

Subjective cognitive decline (SCD) is conceptualized as a preclinical stage of Alzheimer disease (AD) but lacks uniform operationalization. Here we compared perception of memory ability amongst older adults with SCD, mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and normal cognition (CN), as an initial step towards developing improved tools to identify SCD in research or clinical settings. Participants were 87 older adults classified as MCI [11M, n=20, mean age=70.1(5.9), years of education=16.7(4.0), MoCA=25.8(1.9)], SCD [10M, n=34, mean age=70.7(6.2), years of education=18.2(7.8), MoCA=26.9(1.9)], or CN [10M, n=33, mean age=80.0(7.0), years of education=16.1(2.9), MoCA=26.9 (1.9)] based on medical, psychiatric, and neuropsychological (NP) assessments. SCD reported memory change with concern but NP test performance was intact. MCI met NP criteria of scores on ≥ 2 memory tests ≥1.5 SDs lower than expected relative to overall intellect. All participants were independent in functional abilities, and free of medical/neurological etiologies of cognitive impairment and current or past history of psychiatric illness. Subjective memory was evaluated using the Memory Functioning Questionnaire (MFQ) which includes measures of retrospective functioning (RF), frequency of forgetting (FF), seriousness of forgetting (SF) and mnemonics use (MU). ANOVA was used to assess group score differences in total MFQ and its subscales. Exploratory analyses were conducted to compare groups on individual items within subscales where group differences were found. Group differences in total MFQ were found with MCI and SCD groups similarly rating their memory ability as poorer than CN. Groups also differed on FF and SF, but not RF or MU subscales. Relative to CN, MCI participants endorsed greater frequency of memory lapses (p=.024) which included misplacing items, forgetting conversations and losing your train of thought, while SCD participants reported greater seriousness of memory problems (p=.036) that similarly included misplacing items and forgetting conversations, but also forgetting names and words, and knowing whether you have already told someone something. Although both SCD and MCI perceived their overall memory ability to be poorer compared to CN, they differed with respect to reported frequency and seriousness of memory problems. These findings support the need for a better understanding of the nature of subjective memory complaints in SCD.