A new cognitive battery for dementia: Relative severity of deficits in Alzheimer's disease

Abstract

Abstract Six newly constructed cognitive scales with strong reliability for both Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients and healthy older adults were used to examine the pattern of deficits in AD. The performance of 31 patients with mild to moderate probable AD was impaired on all scales (p < .0005) relative to that of 31 age‐ and education‐matched normal controls. In the AD patients, the scales revealed profound, equivalent deficits in secondary verbal and nonverbal memory. Nonmemory deficits were most severe on a measure of executive function (mazes), which was followed by verbal reasoning, visual‐spatial reasoning and vocabulary. From these results, we hypothesized that primary dysfunction of frontal association areas may exceed that of parietal areas in AD. The relationship of this hypothesis to findings from previous studies of neu‐ropathological changes, cerebral glucose metabolism, and cognitive deficits in AD is discussed.