The demographic and clinical characteristics of our sample are given in Table 1. Although there was a female predominance among patients with AD, there was no significant difference in age (p = 0.19) between groups. There was a greater proportion of APOE-4 carriers in the patient group (n = 60/48%) compared with controls (n = 12/20%), and the opposite was true for APOE-4 noncarriers (AD: n = 65/52%; HC: n = 48/80%). Neuropsychological assessment revealed that patients with AD had significantly lower MMSE scores than controls (p<0.001). The group of early or mild AD was made up by 38 patients, while 70 and 17 patients were included in the moderate and severe group, respectively.
