Age of first pain crisis and associated complications in the CASiRe international sickle cell disease cohort

Pain is a hallmark of Sickle Cell Disease (SCD) affecting patients throughout their life; the first pain crisis may occur at any age and is often the first presentation of the disease. Universal newborn screening identifies children with SCD at birth, significantly improving morbidity and mortality. Without early screening, diagnosis is generally made after disease manifestations appear. The Consortium for the Advancement of Sickle Cell Research (CASiRe) is an international collaborative group evaluating the clinical severity of subjects with SCD using a validated questionnaire and medical chart review, standardized across 4 countries (United States, United Kingdom, Italy and Ghana). We investigated the age of first pain crisis in 555 sickle cell subjects, 344 adults and 211 children. Median age of the first crisis in the whole group was 4 years old, 5 years old among adults and 2 years old among children. Patients from the United States generally reported the first crisis earlier than Ghanaians. Experiencing the first pain crisis early in life correlated with the genotype and disease severity. Early recognition of the first pain crisis could be useful to guide counseling and management of the disease.

Development of a psychometrically equivalent short form of the Face-Name Associative Memory Exam for use along the early Alzheimer's disease trajectory

Neuropsychologists are developing more challenging and specific tests to detect early and subtle changes in cognition related to preclinical Alzheimer's disease (AD). The 16-item Face-Name Associative Memory Exam (FNAME-16) is a challenging paired associative memory test able to detect subtle memory changes associated with biomarker evidence of preclinical AD. However, as individuals progress along the AD trajectory, measures that are sensitive at the preclinical stage may become too challenging by the stage of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). Our goal was to develop a modified version of the face-name and face-occupation paired associative memory task (FNAME-12) with fewer stimuli and additional learning trials suitable for use in MCI. We administered the FNAME-12A, an alternate version FNAME 12B, the original FNAME-16, and a series of other neuropsychological measures to 65 clinically normal (CN) older adults (aged 65 to 85) and a subsample characterized by MCI (n = 18). The FNAME-12 exhibited psychometric equivalence with the FNAME-16 (r = .77, p < .001) and was correlated with other measures of episodic and semantic memory. The alternate form, FNAME-12B, was highly correlated with FNAME-12A (r = .76, p < .001). Mean performance on the FNAME 12A, stratified by education, was generated. The task could be completed by our MCI group yet remained challenging in the CN group, providing evidence for its utility along the AD trajectory.