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 <0.2 with narrow 95% confidence intervals, except for non-lacunar infarcts on information processing speed (age, sex, and education adjusted mean difference from reference group (β: - 0.26, p = 0.05). Results were similar in the presence (n = 300) or absence (n = 241) of biomarker co-occurring AD pathology. In multivariate linear regression analysis, higher WMH burden was related to a slightly worse performance on attention and executive functioning (β: - 0.08, p = 0.02) and working memory (β: - 0.08, p = 0.04).

Conclusion

Although different forms of vascular brain injury have different etiologies and different patterns of cerebral damage, they show a largely similar cognitive profile in memory clinic patients regardless of co-occurring AD pathology.