Associations Between Cerebral Morphology and Objective Memory Performance in Patients With Subjective Cognitive Decline

Abstract Background : Previous studies reported subjective cognitive decline (SCD) linked to underlying the biomarker of early AD pathology. There is a lack of studies on whether structural brain changes and how cerebral morphology in association with verbal and visuospatial episodic memory performance. Method: We combined VBM and SBM analysis for evaluating structural alterations in gray matter atrophy and cortical thickness among individuals with SCD, MCI, AD and normal controls and investigated the associations between cerebral morphology and AVLT-H, BVMT-R performance in the whole samples and SCD, respectively. Results: No significant regional gray matter volume atrophy and cortical thickness differences were found between SCD and normal controls. We found that immediate recall in verbal learning performance was significantly correlated with the loss of bilateral hippocampus volume in SCD group, furthermore, attention capacity (SDMT) was positively correlated with bilateral hippocampus atrophy and AVLT-IR in individuals with pre-MCI cognitive status. Conclusions: Our results found hippocampal atrophy links much closer with verbal memory than visuospatial memory and immediate recall in verbal learning test was probably the primary deficit and maybe influenced by the attention capacity.