A Comparison of Semantic Memory in Vascular Dementia and Dementia of Alzheimer's Type

Differential episodic and semantic memory performance in Alzheimer's disease and vascular dementias

“…Consistent with our hypotheses and most previous studies (Bentham et al, 1997;Bernard et al, 1992;Carew et al, 1997), no semantic memory differences were found between AD and either cortical or subcortical vascular dementias. However, in contrast to previous studies (Lafosse et al, 1997;Libon et al, 1997) current results suggest that some of the previously reported episodic memory differences between dementia subtypes may be due to differences in cortical versus white matter subcortical pathology rather than to AD versus vascular etiologies.…”

Differential Lexical and Semantic Spreading Activation in Alzheimer’s Disease

“…As indicated by the means, the total possible word frequencies from the American Heritage corpus were much higher than that for the Francis-Kucera corpus. The result for the data based on the American Heritage corpus is in agreement with an extensive literature demonstrating impaired semantic memory networks in AD as evidenced by naming, 1,3-5 fluency 3,6,8,9 and semantic priming. [16][17][18] The finding that the patients with AD have a reduction in spreading activation in their semantic networks but relative preservation of the lexical networks was expected, since it is known since the work of Braak and Braak 32 that in the neocortex it is the supramodal and polymodal cortex that are the first to deteriorate.…”

Neuropsychological differential diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementia: a systematic review with meta-regressions

“…The dedifferentiation or loss of organization of memory and of its neural bases in AD might further explain the general recall deficits also observed on episodic, semantic as well as memory measures combining semantic and episodic memory (Batchelder et al, 1997;Cannatà et al, 2002;Davis et al, 2002;Hampstead et al, 2010;Laukka et al, 2012;Kwok et al, 2015). However, Bentham et al (1997) found no differences in semantic memory between mild to moderate AD and VaD. Similarly, in a study of well-matched but small samples, Vuorinen et al (2000) reported slightly greater deficits in semantics in AD but also found similar semantic deficits in both diseases.…”