Importance: Although advancing age is the strongest risk factor for the development of symptomatic Alzheimer disease (AD), recent studies have shown that there are individual differences in susceptibility to age-related alterations in the biomarkers of AD pathophysiology.
Objective: To investigate whether cognitive reserve (CR) modifies the adverse influence of age on key cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) biomarkers of AD.
Design, setting, and participants: A cross-sectional cohort of 268 individuals (211 in a cognitively normal group and 57 in a cognitively impaired group) from the Wisconsin Registry for Alzheimer's Prevention and the Wisconsin Alzheimer's Disease Research Center participated in this study. They underwent lumbar puncture for collection of CSF samples, from which Aβ42, total tau (t-tau), and phosphorylated tau (p-tau) were immunoassayed. In addition, we computed t-tau/Aβ42 and p-tau/Aβ42 ratios. Cognitive reserve was indexed by years of education, with 16 or more years taken to confer high reserve. Covariate-adjusted regression analyses were used to test whether the effect of age on CSF biomarkers was modified by CR. The study dates were March 5, 2010, to February 13, 2013.
Main outcomes and measures: Cerebrospinal fluid levels of Aβ42, t-tau, p-tau, t-tau/Aβ42, and p-tau/Aβ42.
Results: There were significant age × CR interactions for CSF t-tau (β [SE] = -6.72 [2.84], P = .02), p-tau (β [SE] = -0.71 [0.27], P = .01), t-tau/Aβ42 (β [SE] = -0.02 [0.01], P = .02), and p-tau/Aβ42 (β [SE] = -0.002 [0.001], P = .004). With advancing age, individuals with high CR exhibited attenuated adverse alterations in these CSF biomarkers compared with individuals with low CR. This attenuation of age effects by CR tended to be more pronounced in the cognitively impaired group compared with the cognitively normal group. There was evidence of a dose-response relationship such that the effect of age on the biomarkers was progressively attenuated given additional years of schooling.
Conclusions and relevance: In a sample composed of a cognitively normal group and a cognitively impaired group, higher CR was associated with a diminution of age-related alterations in CSF biomarkers of AD. This suggests one pathway through which CR might favorably alter lifetime risk for symptomatic AD.