The most consistent cognitive deficit during remission was in working memory, whilst the impairments identified in sustained attention, set shifting and spatial planning were only found in one study.
According to the review, the largest and most consistent cognitive effects in meta-analyses were observed on measures of cognitive speed and attention.
The most consistent cognitive findings are those testing prefrontal cortical function, such as spatial working memory, antisaccade eye movements, olfactory identification, and tasks requiring rapid processing of information such as story recall [ 45].
In general, the main and most consistent risks for cognitive change, in descending order based on the β coefficients, were the baseline value of cognitive function, aging (the combination of the linear and nonlinear terms), age, surviving to the end of the study or being censored due to entrance into managed care plans, education (the combination of the grade school and college terms), and race.
Of its individual components, hypertension and hyperglycemia have proven to be the most consistent determinants of cognitive function in a recent review of published studies [ 12].
And yet, one of the most consistent findings in cognitive psychology is that testing leads to increased retention more than studying alone does (Roediger and Butler, 2011; Roediger and Pyc, 2012).
The main and most consistent risks for declining cognitive function were the baseline values of cognitive function (reflecting substantial regression to the mean), aging (a strong linear pattern of increased decline associated with greater aging, but with diminishing marginal returns), older age at baseline, dying before the end of the study period, lower education, and minority status.
Reduced verbal fluency and, to a lesser extent, executive functioning have been reported as the most consistent early feature of cognitive dysfunction in FTDP-17T individuals (Van Swieten et al., 1999; Ferman et al., 2003).
The cognitive model most consistent with our task and results is that auditory hallucinations represent sub-vocal verbalisation which is not associated with the usual inhibition of auditory cortex that signifies self-production [ 1].
For instance, epidemiological studies report that the combination of episodic and working memory disorders represents the most consistent sign of progression from mild cognitive impairment to AD.
Taken together, these imaging studies reveal brain atrophy in the hippocampal region, which seems to be the most consistent structural marker of the associated cognitive deterioration and a strong predictor of AD.
