AMYPAD: Correlation of Amyloid PET results with anxiety and depressive symptoms in SCD+, MCI and dementia patients.

Background: Depression and anxiety are two frequent neuropsychiatric symptoms in Alzheimer's disease (AD). Moreover, depressive symptoms and anxiety are frequently associated with greater amyloid deposition and risk of Alzheimer's dementia. The aim of the present study is to assess the association between anxiety and depression and amyloid burden. Method: In the AMPYAD study, participants with subjective cognitive decline (SCD+, n = 244), mild cognitive impairment (MCI, n = 341) and dementia (n = 255) were enrolled in eight European memory clinics between 2018 and 2020. They underwent three study visits (baseline, six months, thirteen months) with collection of cognitive data and symptoms of depression and anxiety (Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale, HADS) as well as measures of quality of life and coping strategies. Amyloid burden was obtained as the standardized centiloid values (CL). Correlation analyses were carried out for HADS‐Scores and CL. We analyzed the progression of depressive and anxiety symptoms over time between patients with and without presence of amyloid (CL≥21) using mixed‐model‐ANOVA. All analyses were corrected for time of PET result disclosure. Result: A total of 840 patients (46.2% female; mean age of 70.9 (SD = 7.8)) were included. Among SCD+ patients, CL values were positively correlated with baseline anxiety scores (r(216) =.14, p =.038). In contrast, MCI and dementia patients showed a negative correlation between CL and depressive symptoms (r(296) = ‐.16, p =.005; r(209) = ‐.23, p<.001). In SCD+, there was no significant interaction between time and CL status for anxiety (p =.512), but a significant main effect of time (F(2,302) = 3.4, p =.036, η² =.02), indicating a decline in anxiety symptoms over time. A trend indicated higher anxiety for amyloid positive participants, but the effect missed statistical significance (p =.068). For depressive symptoms, we found no main effects and no significant interaction of time and CL status. Conclusion: The AMYPAD study contains a large amyloid‐PET data set of patients from eight European memory clinics. We observed an association of increased anxiety scores with amyloid load in SCD+, but reduced symptoms of depression with higher amyloid load in the MCI and dementia group. These findings and their longitudinal development over time will be put into a broader context of patient characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]