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P1‐513: TRAJECTORIES OF COGNITIVE CHANGE IN MILD COGNITIVE IMPAIRMENT AND ADULT ATTENTION‐DEFICIT DISORDER
Author(s) -
Callahan Brandy L.,
Sharma Manu J.,
Bierstone Daniel,
Stuss Donald T.,
Black Sandra E.
Publication year - 2018
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.2018.06.524
Subject(s) - verbal fluency test , stroop effect , psychology , cognition , audiology , executive functions , memory span , fluency , dementia , working memory , clinical psychology , psychiatry , developmental psychology , medicine , neuropsychology , disease , mathematics education , pathology
One such domain is social cognition which consists of the ability of emotion recognition and of theory of mind (TOM). There are only few, and partly contradicting, findings about changes of social cognitive abilities during the course of AD. Some evidence indicates that the ability of emotion recognition is reduced already at the level of (amnestic) MCI. Hence, assessment of social cognitive abilities may prove beneficial to early screening and to differential diagnosis. This study presents a cross-sectional comparison of social cognitive abilities, i.e., abilities of emotion recognition and TOM, between healthy controls and patients with MCI and mild AD. Methods:MCI and mild AD patients, cognitive healthy older controls and cognitive healthy younger controls (30 subjects per group planned) were included, matched for age (excluding the younger control group), sex, and level of education. Patients were diagnosed at the Center for Memory Disorders Cologne. They had to conduct two tasks of emotion recognition (Reading the Mind In the Eyes; The Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces) and two tasks assessing TOM (Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition; TOM picture stories). Results:Preliminary results from a single-factor ANCOVA illustrate how social cognition changes over the life span. Younger controls show better emotion recognition and TOM abilities than the older controls, MCI and mild AD patients. Moreover, results indicate that only TOM tasks reveal differences between MCI and mild AD patients in comparison to young and old controls. No such effect was found for tasks of emotion recognition between older controls, MCI, and mild AD patients. Conclusions:This study is one of the first assessing emotion recognition and TOM within the same study sample. Results highlight the importance of using valid normative data in the diagnostic process since abilities of social cognition change over the life span: Only by using normative data derived from adults similar in age, pathological changes can be detected. Moreover, these results illustrate that sensitivity varies between tests which consequently requires careful test selection.