Poster Presentations

Session Title: Alzheimer's Disease (AD) including Non-Cognitive Aspects
Presentation Date: Friday, March 14 – Saturday, March 15, 2009

INTRUSION AND PERSEVERATION AS A FRONTAL ERRORS IN ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE

F. Amores Guevara¹, J.C. Cejudo¹, A. Jarne Esparcia^2
1Dementia and Cognitive Impairment Unit, Hospital Sagrat Cor SSM, Martorell, Spain, ²Personality, Assessment and Psychological Treatment Department. Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

Background and methods: Intrusion and perseveration is common in Alzheimer´s disease (AD). We document the type and quantitative burden of intrusion and perseveration as a cognitive impairment, comparing normal aging (n = 30) and mild AD (n = 30) by administering a neuropsychological compendium tests. The aim of this study is to quantify the qualitative observations of intrusion and perseveration during neuropsychological assesment as a “frontal errors” measure.
Results: We found both intrusion and perseveration increase significantly in AD group in different neuropsycological measures (statistical comparation by t-test for independent samples assumed equal variances) and in a total amount of this errors. Levene test F=5,18, t-test=4,48, p=0,029 for sumatory of different errors (intrusion and perseveration) in different neuropsychological test.
Conclusion: We propose a quantitative measure of called “frontal errors” extracted from classical neuropsychological assessment test (verbal fluency task, Trail Making Test, clock test, verbal learning test and naming task) can be used to reflect the deterioration of frontal brain regions in AD..