How Do Different Forms of Vascular Brain Injury Relate to Cognition in a Memory Clinic Population : The TRACE-VCI Study

BACKGROUND: Memory clinic patients frequently present with different forms of vascular brain injury due to different etiologies, often co-occurring with Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathology. OBJECTIVE: We studied how cognition was affected by different forms of vascular brain injury, possibly in interplay with AD pathology. METHODS: We included 860 memory clinic patients with vascular brain injury on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), receiving a standardized evaluation including cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) biomarker analyses (n = 541). The cognitive profile of patients with different forms of vascular brain injury on MRI (moderate/severe white matter hyperintensities (WMH) (n = 398), microbleeds (n = 368), lacunar (n = 188) and non-lacunar (n = 96) infarct(s), macrobleeds (n = 16)) was assessed by: 1) comparison of all these different forms of vascular brain injury with a reference group (patients with only mild WMH (n = 205) without other forms of vascular brain injury), using linear regression analyses also stratified for CSF biomarker AD profile and 2) multivariate linear regression analysis. RESULTS: The cognitive profile was remarkably similar across groups. Compared to the reference group effect sizes on all domains were