Verbal fluency in Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and major depression

Abstract

OBJECTIVE:To compare verbal fluency among Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and major depression and to assess the sociodemographic and clinical factors associated with the disease severity.METHODS:Patients from an outpatient university center with a clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease or major depression were studied. Severity was staged using the Hoehn & Yahr scale, the Hamilton Depression scale and the Clinical Dementia Rating for Parkinson's disease, major depression, and Alzheimer's disease, respectively. All subjects were tested with the Mini-Mental State Examination, the digit span test, and the verbal fluency test (animals).We fit four types of regression models for the count variable: Poisson model, negative binomial model, zero-inflated Poisson model, and zero-inflated negative binomial model.RESULTS:The mean digit span and verbal fluency scores were lower in patients with Alzheimer's disease (n = 34) than in patients with major depression (n = 52) or Parkinson's disease (n = 17) (p<0.001). The average number of words listed was much lower for Alzheimer's disease patients (7.2 words) compared to the patients presenting with major depression (14.6 words) or Parkinson's disease (15.7 words) (KW test = 32.4; p<0.01). Major depression and Parkinson's disease groups listed 44% (ROM = 1.44) and 48% (ROM = 1.48) more words, respectively, compared to those patients with Alzheimer's disease; these results were independent of age, education, disease severity and attention. Independently of diagnosis, age, and education, severe disease showed a 26% (ROM = 0.74) reduction in the number of words listed when compared to mild cases.CONCLUSIONS:Verbal fluency provides a better characterization of Alzheimer's disease, major depression, and Parkinson's disease, even at later stages.

New ways to analyze word generation performance in brain injury: A systematic review and meta-analysis of additional performance measures

“…Empirical evidence of impaired word generation performance has been provided for an immense variety of disorders and etiologies, such as dementia (Araujo et al, 2011;Beatty et al, 1997;Rosen, 1980) or mild cognitive impairment (Kleissendorf, Jaecks, & Stenneken, 2009;Nutter-Upham et al, 2008;Östberg, Fernaeus, Hellström, Bogdanovic, & Wahlund, 2005), ischemic or hemorrhagic strokes (Basso et al, 1997;Gaspers et al, 2012;Kim et al, 2011), traumatic brain injury (Drake, Gray, Yoder, Pramuka, & Llewellyn, 2000;Gaspers et al, 2012;Henry & Crawford, 2004), schizophrenia and bipolar disorder (Costafreda et al, 2011;Gourovitch, Goldberg, & Weinberger, 1996;Nicodemus et al, 2013;Paulsen et al, 1996;Rossell, 2006;Sumiyoshi et al, 2014), depression (Araujo et al, 2011;Schmid, Strand, Ardal, Lund, & Hammar, 2011), Parkinson's disease (Piatt, Fields, Paolo, Koller, & Tröster, 1999;Testa et al, 1998), Huntington's chorea (Azambuja, Haddad, Radanovic, Barbaso, & Mansur, 2007;Rosser & Hodges, 1994), multiple sclerosis (Beatty, 2002;Friend et al, 1999;Henry & Beatty, 2006;Thiele, 2013), and autism (Begeer et al, 2013;Inokuchi & Kamio, 2013;Kenworthy et al, 2013). Word generation tasks are also used to specify physiological and pathological conditions of performance across lifespan, which provides information on developmental changes (Henry & Phillips, 2006;Hughes & Bryan, 2002;…”

Methodological Criteria for Scoring Clustering and Switching in Verbal Fluency Tasks

“…In SVF tasks, the words retrieved should belong to a certain category, such as fruits, animals and clothes; whereas animals is the most commonly used category in the literature (Charchat-Fichman, Oliveira, & Silva, 2011). Most Brazilian studies on VF include SVF tasks using the animal category (Araujo et al, 2011;Brucki, Malheiros, Okamoto, & Bertolucci, 1997;Brucki & Rocha, 2004;Caramelli, Carthery-Goulart, Porto, CharchatFichman, & Nitrini, 2007;Lopes et al, 2009;Silva, Yassuda, Guimarães, & Florindo, 2011). There is a small number of studies using fruits (Paula et al, 2010), body parts (Malloy-Diniz et al, 2007), and clothes (Fonseca, Parente, Côté, Ska, & Joanette, 2008;Moraes et al, 2014;Zimmermann, Parente, Joanette, & Fonseca, 2014).…”

Frontal assessment battery and frontal atrophy in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

“…However, injury to the orbitofrontal cortex may impair aspects of verbal intelligence such as verbal fluency or performance on the similarity test by different mechanisms (e.g., perseveration). Indeed, some studies have demonstrated an association between the orbitofrontal cortex and the verbal fluency and similarity tests (Araujo et al., ; Lovstad et al., ; Ravnkilde, Videbech, Rosenberg, Gjedde, & Gade, ). On the other hands, the motor series score showed a significant correlation with the gray matter volume of the right orbitofrontal gyrus, whereas the motor series score was not significantly lower in ALS patients than in normal controls.…”