Table 1.
Participant characteristics by dementia status (n = 149)
| Total | Dementia† | ||
| No | Yes | ||
| N | 149 | 102 | 47 |
| Characteristic | |||
| Age at Last Cognitive Assessment, | 88.1 (5.0) | 88.2 (5.0) | 88.0 (4.9) |
| Mean Years (SD) | |||
| Level of Education, % | |||
| Bachelor’s Degree | 42.3 | 42.2 | 42.6 |
| ≥Master’s Degree | 57.7 | 57.8 | 57.4 |
| Presence of APOE ɛ4, % | 26.2 | 19.6 | 40.4** |
| Autobiography Measures | |||
| Emotional Expressivity | |||
| Raw Word Count‡ | |||
| Mean (SD) | 8.8 (7.4) | 8.3 (7.3) | 9.8 (7.5) |
| Median (Range) | 7.0 (0–32) | 6.0 (0–32) | 8.0 (0–29) |
| High Emotional Expressivity§, % | 53.7 | 51.0 | 59.6 |
| High Idea Density¶, % | 80.5 | 91.2 | 57.5** |
| High Grammatical Complexity¶, % | 78.5 | 83.3 | 68.1* |
*p < 0.05; **p < 0.01. †Based on diagnosis of dementia at the last cognitive assessment. ‡Autobiographies were required to be no more than one page in length, providing an approximate standard length for comparison. §≥50th percentile ranking within convent. ¶Upper three quartiles. APOE ɛ4, apolipoprotein E ɛ4 allele; SD, standard deviation.