Detecting Anosognosia from the Prodromal Stage of Alzheimer’s Disease

BACKGROUND: Though not originally developed for this purpose, the Healthy Aging Brain Care Monitor (HABC-M) seems a valuable instrument for assessing anosognosia in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). OBJECTIVES: Our study aimed at 1) investigating the validity of the HABC-M (31 items), and its cognitive, psychological, and functional subscales, in discriminating AD patients from controls; 2) exploring whether the HABC-M discrepancy scores between the self-reports of patients/controls in these different domains and the respective ratings provided by their caregivers/informants correlate with an online measure of self-awareness; 3) determining whether the caregiver burden level, also derived from the HABC-M, could add additional support for detecting anosognosia. METHODS: The HABC-M was administered to 30 AD patients and 30 healthy controls, and to their caregivers/informants. A measure of online awareness was established from subjects’ estimation of their performances in a computerized experiment. RESULTS: The HABC-M discrepancy scores distinguished AD patients from controls. The cognitive subscale discriminated the two groups from the prodromal AD stage, with an AUC of 0.88 [95% CI: 0.78;0.97]. Adding the caregiver burden level raised it to 0.94 [0.86;0.99]. Significant correlations between the HABC-M and online discrepancy scores were observed in the patients group, providing convergent validity of these methods. CONCLUSIONS: The cognitive HABC-M (six items) can detect anosognosia across the AD spectrum. The caregiver burden (four items) may corroborate the suspicion of anosognosia. The short-hybrid scale, built from these 10 items instead of the usual 31, showed the highest sensitivity for detecting anosognosia from the prodromal AD stage, which may further help with timely diagnosis.