| Objective The main aims of this study were (1) to know the status, the trends over time and influencing factors regarding cognition, depression, activity of daily living, and quality of life among patients with Alzheimer’s disease;(2) to explore the relations among cognition, depression, activity of daily living, and quality of life among patients with AD;(3) to provide the theory basis for formulating scientific and reasonable strategies for disease control and prevention.Methods Based on AD patients’ follow-up data of baseline, single factor analysis and multiple linear regression analysis were used to identify significant factors related to AD patients" cognition, depression, activity of daily living, and quality of life. Multivariate multilevel model was applied to find out the correlations between the AD patients’ cognition and depression. AD patients" activity of daily living and quality of life, to assess the trends over time and their influencing factors, and to explore cognition and depression relations to activity of daily living and quality of life.Results1. Multivariate multilevel model fitted our data well.2. With cognition and depression as the dependent variables, the multivariate multilevel model analysis indicated that reading books or newspapers, aluminum cooking utensils use, dietary restriction and hypertension were the common significant factors for cognition and depression of patients. Education, character, hobbies, sports activities were the significant factors for patients’ cognition; Marriage, occupation and doing housework were the significant factors for patients’depression. The patients who have higher education level, extroverted personality, more hobbies, frequent sports activities, more readings of books or newspapers, less aluminum cooking utensils use, less restrict dietary and no hypertension had better cognition; Subjects who are single, engaged in manual labor work,less housework,less readings of books or newspapers, more aluminum cooking utensils use, restrict dietary and hypertension had higher depression score. AD patients" cognition and depression had negative correlation at individual level and observation time level and the correlation coefficients were-0.685and-0.354, respectively.3. With activity of daily living, quality of life as the dependent variables, the multivariate multilevel model analysis indicated that the patients’cognition and depression were the significant factors for both the activity of daily living and quality of life of AD patients. Education, doing housework, cognition and depression were the significant factors for activity of daily living of patients. Marriage, sports activities, reading books or newspapers, drinking, cognition and depression were the significant factors for quality of life of patients. The patients who had higher education level, more housework, higher cognition scores and lower depression scores had better activity of daily living; Subjects who are single, less sports activities, less readings of books or newspapers, no drinking, lower cognition scores and higher depression scores had worse quality of life. AD patients" activity of daily living and quality of life had negative correlation at individual level and observation time level and the correlation coefficients were-0.379and-0.238, respectively.Conclusion There are many factors influencing cognition, depression, activity of daily living, and quality of life of the patients with Alzheimer’s disease and we need to focus on the disease’s prevention and treatment. In addition, compared with the traditional method, multivariate multilevel model had an advantage in that it can not only analyze the influencing factors but also analyze each dependent variable’s trends over time and their correlations. |
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