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P4‐163: TRAJECTORIES OF COGNITIVE DECLINE IN VARIOUS TYPES OF DEMENTIA
Author(s) -
Smits Lieke,
Corien van Harten Argonde,
Pijnenburg Yolande,
Koedam Esther,
Sistermans Nicole,
RoosReuling Ilona,
Prins Niels,
Lemstra Evelien,
Scheltens Philip,
Flier Wiesje M.
Publication year - 2014
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.2014.05.1680
Subject(s) - dementia , neuropsychology , cognition , dementia with lewy bodies , cognitive decline , frontotemporal dementia , psychology , executive functions , vascular dementia , audiology , effects of sleep deprivation on cognitive performance , alzheimer's disease , medicine , psychiatry , disease
memory complaints in the last 6 mounts, enrolled a well characterized AD assessment. Briefly, each participant undergoes an evaluation that includes a medical examination, interview, neuropsychological testing. To control the confounding effect of severity of impairment and stage of the Alzheimer’s Disease, our sample is limited to individuals with mild AD as shown by MMSE scores between 21-24 and Geriatric Depression Score over 14.For fluency and naming ability, we used categoric fluency (finding words in animal category among one minute), lexical fluency (finding words starting with K, A, S letters in one minute), and for confrontaional naming, shortened Turkish form of Boston Naming Test is used. Results: Study group consisted of 26 female 10 male mild stage AD patients. Male patients, ranged in age from 64 to 80 (mean age 76.8 65.7); female patient , ranged in age from 65 to 89 (mean age 78.3 65.8). All participants were right handed. Average duration of education in male participants is 1263.4 years and in female participants is 6.864.1 years. Boston Naming Test (BNT) scores are calculated over the percentage of correct namings. The mean of the BNT in the study group is 74.95613.1. Categoric fluency mean of the study group is 10.4464.59 word. Lexical fluency is calculated over the sum of 3 letters (K,A,S) and the mean of the lexical fluency in the study group is 19.4369.52 word.There is a significant correlation between semantic fluency performance and confrontational naming in the current study group (p1⁄40.05). However this statistical correlation can not be observed between phonemic fluency and confrontational naming scores. Recent neuroimaging evidences support our findings. When the relation between semantic knowledge and abstraction task is examined, there is no significant relation between proverb abstraction and BNTwhereas significant relation (p<0.01) found between Wechsler Similarites Subtest and BNT. These results suggest that task of similarities abstraction is also related to semantic storage. Conclusions: Phonemic fluency requires a scanning strategy for lexical representations. However, category fluency requires an investigation of words from an exponential semantic storage. Because of this different structural and funcitonal demands, categorical fluency should be attributed to the semantic memory instead of executive functions. Because the semantic storage is already affected at the early stage of AD, patients seem to display insufficiency at abstraction when it is evaluated with pairedword similarities.