The influence of age, gender and education on the performance of healthy individuals on a battery for assessing limb apraxia

Abstract

Introduction: Apraxia is defined as a disorder of learned skilled movements, in the absence of elementary motor or sensory deficits and general cognitive impairment, such as inattention to commands, object-recognition deficits or poor oral comprehension. Limb apraxia has long been a challenge for clinical assessment and understanding and covers a wide spectrum of disorders, all involving motor cognition and the inability to perform previously learned actions. Demographic variables such as gender, age, and education can influence the performance of individuals on different neuropsychological tests. Objective: The present study aimed to evaluate the performance of healthy subjects on a limb apraxia battery and to determine the influence of gender, age, and education on the praxis skills assessed. Methods: Forty-four subjects underwent a limb apraxia battery, which was composed of numerous subtests for assessing both the semantic aspects of gestural production as well as motor performance itself. The tasks encompassed lexical-semantic aspects related to gestural production and motor activity in response to verbal commands and imitation. Results: We observed no gender effects on any of the subtests. Only the subtest involving visual recognition of transitive gestures showed a correlation between performance and age. However, we observed that education level influenced subject performance for all sub tests involving motor actions, and for most of these, moderate correlations were observed between education level and performance of the praxis tasks. Conclusion: We conclude that the education level of participants can have an important influence on the outcome of limb apraxia tests.

Effect of test instructions: The example of the pantomime production task

“…No age and level of education effect was observed on accuracy and BPT errors in our group of participants; this outcome is consistent with results from some previous studies (Bartolo et al, 2008;Mantovani-Nagaoka and Ortiz, 2016), but not with other findings (e.g., Ska and Nespoulous, 1987;Peigneux and Van der Linden, 1999). The pass/fail score we used, the number of items included (N=15) or the number of participants tested might have nuanced the age difference in performances.…”

Bimanual Gesture Imitation Links to Cognition and Olfaction

“…We found an association between age and bimanual gesture imitation performance, which was in line with previous reports on the age differences on imitation of transitive gestures, proximal and distal gestures, and sequences of movements . Another prior report on ideomotor apraxia did not find an age effect, perhaps due to differences in sample characteristics, sample sizes, and ideomotor assessment.…”

The dementia apraxia test can detect early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.

“…The fact that our AD participants tended to be less educated than the HC participants and were predominantly female may not have been a coincidence, as both factors may increase the likelihood of disease onset in people at risk (Dubois et al, 2021). Based on previous literature (Mantovani-Nagaoka & Ortiz, 2016; Rodrigues Cavalcante & Caramelli, 2009; Tessari et al, 2015), sex differences in praxis were neither expected nor found.…”