Participants reported no serious neurodegenerative diseases at interview, nor exhibited clinically significant cerebral features on MRI as assessed by a consultant neuroradiologist (JMW). Written informed consent was obtained from each participant prior to testing,

which was conducted in compliance with departmental guidelines on participant testing and the Declaration of Helsinki. Ethical approval was gained from NHS Lothian Research Ethics Committee and the Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences Research Ethics Committee at the University of Edinburgh. Immediate verbal memory was assessed using Logical Memory (LM) and Verbal Paired Associates (VPA) tests from the Wechsler Memory selleck kinase inhibitor Scale

IIIUK (WMS-III; Wechsler, 1998). In LM part I, participants are presented with two stories that both contain 25 elements. The first story is read aloud, and then scored based on the number of elements recalled by the participant immediately after reading. The second story repeats this pattern twice, and the participant is informed they will be tested again later. In LM part II, following an approximately 30 min delay, scores are based on the ability to recall as many items U0126 as possible from the two stories. For the VPA part I, eight pairs of unrelated words are read to participants. Without a delay, they are then given Lck the first item of each pair and ask to recall the associated word. This procedure using the same 8 word pairs is repeated a further three times with no delay. In VPA II, there is one further trial following a 30 min delay, in which the word pairs are not read out first. Immediate verbal

memory recall was assessed using the LM I and VPA I scores and delayed verbal memory recall was assessed using LM II and the VPA II scores. These tests exhibit good test-retest reliability in participants aged 70–74 years; LM I = .81, LM II = .77, VPA I = .94 and VPA II = .87 (Wechsler, 1997). Full details of the brain MRI protocol, including figures illustrating the images acquired, are available in Wardlaw et al. (2011). Briefly, participants were scanned using a GE Signa Horizon HDxt 1.5 T clinical scanner (General Electric, Milwaukee, USA). Image acquisition took approximately 70 min, and comprised whole brain T2-, T2*- and FLAIR-weighted axial scans, a high-resolution 3D T1-weighted volume sequence acquired in the coronal plane (voxel dimensions 1 × 1 × 1.