Informant Effect on Functional Activities Questionnaire scores in the National Alzheimer's Coordinating Center Uniform Data Set
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The Functional Activities Questionnaire (FAQ) is one of the most frequently used functionality assessments in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD). It is an informant-based assessment wherein informants are asked to rate daily instrumental activities performance in the patient. We have found that informant characteristics influence the Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR) in the National Alzheimer's Coordinating Center Uniform Data Set (NACC-UDS). We aimed to evaluate informant characteristics' effect on the FAQ in patients with mild cognitive impairment or dementia due to AD participating in the NACC-UDS. METHOD: We included all participants from the NACC-UDS that had AD as the principal diagnosis, and the Mini-Mental State Examination or Montreal Cognitive Assessment scores, informant characteristics, CDR global score (CDR-GS) and the FAQ score. We performed a conditional growth model using multilevel linear regression analysis. RESULT: We included 19863 participants, totalling 45596 visits with a median of 2 (1-4) visits. The patient's age at the initial visit was 74.1±9.4 years and 53.8% were females. Informants were 66.2±13.2 years, 69.2% were females, and the relationship was 61.0% spouse or partner, 26.7% children and 12.3% other. The FAQ scores were affected by informant characteristics. The FAQ scores were 0.48 (CI 95%:0.31 to 0.65) higher with female informants, 2.04 (CI 95%: 1.79 to 2.28) higher when informants were children, and 0.30 (CI 95%: 0.01 to 0.60) higher when informants were other family members, both compared with spouses or partners. The frequency of visits was associated with a FAQ score 0.57 lower (CI 95%:-0.89 to -0.26) when visiting daily, 1.54 lower (CI 95%:-1.78 to -1.29) when visiting at least once per week, and 2.50 lower (CI 95%:-2.80 to -2.20) when visiting less than once a week compared with living with the patient. As expected, FAQ scores increased with lower Z-standardized cognitive scores. CONCLUSION: We found that the FAQ scores are modified by informant characteristics in the NACC-UDS patients with AD diagnosis. These results are clinically relevant because FAQ is often used to evaluate the severity of AD impact on instrumental activities of daily and monitor the functional decline in AD.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.074 | 0.139 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".