528 Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, 28:528–535, 2006 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1380-3395 DOI: 10.1080/13803390590949340 NCEN 1380-3395 0000-0000 Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, Vol. 28, No. 04, February 2006: pp. 0–0 Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology Working-Delayed Memory Difference Detects Mild Cognitive Impairment Without Being Affected by Age and Education Working-Delayed Memory Difference Detects MCI A. Economou et al. ALEXANDRA ECONOMOU, 1 SOKRATIS PAPAGEORGIOU, 2 AND CLEMENTINE KARAGEORGIOU 2 1 The University of Athens, Athens, Greece 2 Athens State General Hospital “G. Gennimatas” Performance on neuropsychological tests is affected by age and education, which makes the early detection of cognitive impairment difficult when assessing individuals of varying levels of education. We examined the effects of age, education, and gender on three memory indexes of the Wechsler Memory Scale-III, Delayed Memory, Work- ing Memory and the difference between Working-Delayed Memory in a sample of patients with amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment, patients with mild probable Alzheimer’s disease, and a nondemented elderly comparison group. Whereas Delayed and Working Memory scores were affected by participant type, age, and education, the Working- Delayed Memory difference score was affected by participant type, only. Our preliminary conclusions, pending replication of the findings with a larger sample, are that working-delayed memory difference was sensitive to early memory decline without being affected by age and education. Introduction An impairment of episodic memory is one of the earliest indicators of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) in individuals with mild memory loss (Albert, Moss, Tanzi, & Jones, 2001; Backman & Small, 1998; Petersen et al., 1999). However, the assessment of memory for the early detection of AD is complicated by the sensitivity of neuropsychological tests to age and education (Inouye, Albert, Mohs, Sun, & Berkman, 1993; Lannoo & Vingerhoets, 1997; Pontón et al., 1996; Rentz et al., 2000). The boundary between normal aging and mild cognitive impairment is, therefore, unclear in terms of neuropsychological data, which may lead the clinician to overinterpret the degree of impairment in some individuals (Petersen, 2000), or to miss early memory difficulties in individuals of high level of edu- cation (Luis, Loewenstein, Acevedo, Barker, & Duara, 2003; Rentz et al., 2000). Further- more, many neuropsychological tests lack normative data for the oldest old, diverse cultural groups and those with low educational attainment (Luis et al., 2003). Taking into Received 17 September 2003; accepted 3 January 2005. Parts of the data were presented at the 2nd Hellenic Interdisciplinary Conference of Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Disorders, Thessaloniki, Greece, January 2002. We thank Margarita Sarri for assistance with psychometric assessments, Emy Sarafidou for statistical advice and three anony- mous reviewers for comments on an earlier version of this paper. Sokratis Papageorgiou is currently at the University of Athens Department of Neurology. Address correspondence to Alexandra Economou, The University of Athens, School of Philosophy, Department of Psychology, Panepistimiopolis, Ilissia 157 84, Athens, Greece. E-mail: aoikono@psych.uoa.gr