Charting the decline in spontaneous writing in Alzheimer's disease: a longitudinal study

Abstract

Cross-sectional comparisons indicated that minimal-moderate AD patients produced more semantic paraphasias, phonological paraphasias, and empty and indefinite phrases, whilst producing fewer pictorial themes, repairing fewer errors, and producing shorter and less complex sentences than controls. The two groups could not be distinguished on visual paraphasias. Longitudinal follow-up, however, suggested that visual processing deteriorates over time, where the prevalence of visual errors increased over 12 months. Discussion The findings suggest that the deterioration of writing skills observed in the spontaneous writings of AD patients shows a pattern of impairment dominated by semantic errors with a secondary impairment in phonological processing, which is later joined by a disruption of visuospatial and graphomotor processing.

Increased Diagnostic Accuracy of Digital vs. Conventional Clock Drawing Test for Discrimination of Patients in the Early Course of Alzheimer’s Disease from Cognitively Healthy Individuals

“…Thus, to perform clock drawing successfully it demands—apart of visual memory and reconstruction, and visuospatial abilities—executive functions (Shulman et al, 1986; Croisile, 1999; Forbes et al, 2004; Yan et al, 2008; Forbes-Mckay et al, 2014). Prolonged in-air trajectories might reflect impaired decision making due to frontal and temporoparietal disturbances that are often exhibited in the early course of AD and even in patients with aMCI (Samton et al, 2005; Zheng et al, 2012; Blanco Martín et al, 2016) and these interfere with cCDT demands like on-demand motor planning, execution (praxis) and executive function (Forbes et al, 2004; Yan et al, 2008; Forbes-Mckay et al, 2014). According to this we found significant impairment in TMT-B performance in our eDAT individuals compared to the other groups that might be most likely ascribed to increased deterioration in cognitive flexibility and executive functions (Crowe, 1998; Chen et al, 2009).…”

“…cCDT demands like drawing and handwriting are complex human activities that entail an intricate blend of cognitive, kinesthetic and perceptual-motor components, including visual perception, memory and reconstruction, visuospatial abilities, on-demand motor planning and execution (praxis) and executive function (Forbes et al, 2004; Yan et al, 2008; Forbes-Mckay et al, 2014). Thus, these characteristics of the drawing process suggest that it might be sensitive to impairments in cognitive functioning, and thus assessments of drawings might facilitate the diagnosis of such impairments (Schmitt et al, 2009).…”

A Morphological Approach to the Longitudinal Detection of Dementia

“…Studies have been conducted to apply a text processing approach to this issue, examining dementia patients' linguistic characteristics manifested in writings in a longitudinal manner [5,6,9,12,15,18]. However, the role of morphology has not been investigated in such studies.…”

Is cognitive impairment associated with reduced syntactic complexity in writing? Evidence from automated text analysis

“…Written language impairment in AD can also be observed on the discourse level, taking the structural information of the text into consideration including measures of syntactic complexity (see, e.g.,, Kemper et al, 1993;Pakhomov et al, 2011;Snowdon et al, 1996). A significant decrease in syntactic complexity has thus been observed in patients with AD compared to healthy controls both in spoken language (Ahmed et al, 2013;Forbes-McKay et al, 2014;Lundholm et al, 2018;Roark et al, 2011) and in written texts (Kemper et al, 1993;Tsantali et al, 2013). Snowdon et al (1996) measured the idea density in letters from applicants to an order of nuns.…”