Category fluency is also predominantly affected in Swiss Alzheimer's disease patients

Objectives – To establish the comparative efficacy to differentiate between Swiss patients with dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT) and elderly normal control subjects (NC) on two different verbal fluency tasks: category fluency and letter fluency. Material and methods – Fifty Swiss German DAT pati...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Acta neurologica Scandinavica 1997-02, Vol.95 (2), p.81-84
Main Authors: Monsch, A. U., Seifritz, E., Taylor, K. I., Ermini-Fünfschilling, D., Stähelin, H. B., Spiegel, R.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Aged
Aged, 80 and over
Alzheimer Disease - complications
Alzheimer Disease - physiopathology
Alzheimer's disease
Analysis of Variance
Biological and medical sciences
Case-Control Studies
category fluency
Chi-Square Distribution
Concept Formation - physiology
Degenerative and inherited degenerative diseases of the nervous system. Leukodystrophies. Prion diseases
Female
Humans
Language Disorders - etiology
Language Disorders - physiopathology
letter fluency
Male
Medical sciences
Memory Disorders - etiology
Memory Disorders - physiopathology
Mental Recall - physiology
Middle Aged
Neurology
Neuropsychological Tests
Phonetics
receiver operating characteristic curve
ROC Curve
Semantics
Sensitivity and Specificity
Switzerland
Verbal Behavior - physiology
verbal fluency
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Summary:Objectives – To establish the comparative efficacy to differentiate between Swiss patients with dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT) and elderly normal control subjects (NC) on two different verbal fluency tasks: category fluency and letter fluency. Material and methods – Fifty Swiss German DAT patients in the early stages of the disease and 50 matched normal control subjects were compared on letter and category fluency tasks. Results – DAT patients exhibited an overproportional impairment on category fluency as compared with letter fluency. Receiver operating characteristic curves (ROC) showed that category fluency correctly classified a significantly higher number of DAT patients and NC subjects (84%) than letter fluency (70%). Conclusion – As similar findings have been described for English‐speaking DAT patients, we conclude that deficiencies in category fluency are a general phenomenon, reflecting impaired structures of semantic knowledge occurring early in the course of Alzheimer's disease.
ISSN:0001-6314
1600-0404
DOI:10.1111/j.1600-0404.1997.tb00073.x