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P3‐155: Assessing the capacity of patients with dementia to provide informed consent to participate in research: How important is memory?
Author(s) -
Sachs Jane F.,
Lee Jacqueline,
Zugin Zachary,
Carlsson Cynthia M.,
Blazel Hanna,
Markgraf Tamara,
Asthana Sanjay,
Gleason Carey E.
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
alzheimer's and dementia
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 6.713
H-Index - 118
eISSN - 1552-5279
pISSN - 1552-5260
DOI - 10.1016/j.jalz.2010.05.1653
Subject(s) - informed consent , recall , dementia , psychology , process (computing) , association (psychology) , social psychology , public relations , medicine , cognitive psychology , political science , computer science , alternative medicine , psychotherapist , disease , pathology , operating system
show a similar pattern of performance on measures of verbal fluency. Methods: Eighty-one aMCI, 54 mild AD, and 97 normal control (NC) subjects were identified from the database of the Easton Center for Alzheimer’s Disease Research. These subjects underwent formal neuropsychological assessment that included verbal fluency tasks based on phonemic (generating words with specified letters of the alphabet) and semantic/categorical (generating words within a specified category, e.g., animals) criteria. Raw and standardized scores were compared between aMCI, AD, and NC groups using one-way analysis of covariance (ANCOVA), controlling for age and education. In addition, a difference score was calculated between semantic and phonemic fluency trials to examine the association between semantic and phonemic fluency. Results: Phonemic and semantic verbal fluency raw and standardized scores were significantly lower in the AD group than both aMCI and NC groups while the aMCI group produced scores that were intermediate to that of the other two groups. In contrast, the semantic-phonemic difference score was significantly higher in the NC group than the aMCI and AD groups, but the latter two groups did not differ significantly on this measure. On average, the NC group produced 6.4 more words on semantic fluency than phonemic fluency while the aMCI and AD groups produced an average of 2 and 1.75 more words, respectively, with semantic than phonemic cues. Conclusions: The fewer words produced by aMCI and AD patients on semantic fluency relative to phonemic fluency suggest greater impairment in semantic knowledge and retrieval. This has been well documented in AD but the similarity in pattern of performance suggests that similar neuropathological changes may also be present in aMCI.