Semantic, phonologic, and verb fluency in Huntington's disease

Abstract

Verbal fluency tasks have been identified as important indicators of executive functioning impairment in patients with frontal lobe dysfunction. Although the usual evaluation of this ability considers phonologic and semantic criteria, there is some evidence that fluency of verbs would be more sensitive in disclosing frontostriatal physiopathology since frontal regions primarily mediate retrieval of verbs. Huntington’s disease usually affects these circuitries.ObjectiveTo compare three types of verbal fluency task in the assessment of frontal-striatal dysfunction in HD subjects.MethodsWe studied 26 Huntington’s disease subjects, divided into two subgroups: mild (11) and moderate (15) along with 26 normal volunteers matched for age, gender and schooling, for three types of verbal fluency: phonologic fluency (F-A-S), semantic fluency and fluency of verbs.ResultsHuntington’s disease subjects showed a significant reduction in the number of words correctly generated in the three tasks when compared to the normal group. Both controls and Huntington’s disease subjects showed a similar pattern of decreasing task performance with the greatest number of words being generated by semantic elicitation followed by verbs and lastly phonologic criteria. We did not find greater production of verbs compared with F-A-S and semantic conditions. Moreover, the fluency of verbs distinguished only the moderate group from controls.ConclusionOur results indicated that phonologic and semantic fluency can be used to evaluate executive functioning, proving more sensitive than verb fluency. However, it is important to point out that the diverse presentations of Huntington’s disease means that an extended sample is necessary for more consistent analysis of this issue.

Language impairment in Huntington's disease

“…Time restriction to perform the task may also be a factor that contributes to poor results 22 . Action fluency was worse in HD patients, a finding already reported by our group in a previous study 23 . Impaired verb generation in HD patients was described by Péran 24 , and such difficulties with action naming are hypothesized as being related to frontal dysfunction 25 .…”

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;…”

Does previous presentation of verbal fluency tasks affect verb fluency performance?

“…The cultural and demographic profile of North American or European populations is very different from those observed in developing countries such as Brazil. To our knowledge, apart from some studies in Brazilian patients with clinical conditions, 24 , 29 - 31 this is the first study focusing on the application of the VF task in a healthy elderly Brazilian population. Future studies should explore VF performance in younger population and other neurological disorders.…”