Effects of age, education, and gender on CERAD neuropsychological test performance in an African American sample

Eighty-three normal, healthy, African American men and women aged 65 and older completed the Consortium to Establish a Registry for Alzheimers Disease-Neuropsychological Battery (CERAD-NB). Regression analyses indicated powerful education and less marked age and gender influences on CERAD-NB test performance. Higher education was associated with better performance on nearly all CERAD-NB tests, age effects were noted only on tile memory indices (younger subjects had better scores), and women performed slightly better than men on one index from the Word List Learning Test. Age and education interacted on the Word List Learning Test such that the best scores were obtained by younger subjects with more years of schooling: the other age-education combinations did not differ from each other. Factor analysis revealed a two-factor solution (i.e., a nonmemory general cognitive factor and a verbal memory factor) which at counted for 67% or the variance. Education-stratified normative data are presented for each of the CERAD-NB rests.