Cognitive estimation impairment in Alzheimer disease and mild cognitive impairment.

Abstract

Intact executive functioning is believed to be required for performance on tasks requiring cognitive estimations. This study used a revised version of a cognitive estimations test (CET) to investigate whether patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) were impaired on the CET compared with normal elderly controls (NECs). Neuropsychological tests were administered to determine the relationship between CET performance and other cognitive domains. AD patients displayed impaired CET performance when compared with NECs but MCI patients did not. Negative correlations between tests of working memory (WM) and semantic memory and the CET were found in NECs and AD patients, indicating that these cognitive domains were important for CET performance. Regression analysis suggests that AD patients were unable to maintain semantic information in WM to perform the task. The authors conclude that AD patients display deficits in working memory, semantic memory, and executive function, which are required for adequate CET performance.

The Brixton Spatial Anticipation Test as a test for executive function: Validity in patient groups and norms for older adults

“…When considering that the main psychiatric diagnosis of our sample of patients was psychotic disorders, this fi nding is in line with other studies showing dysexecutive problems in these patients (Hutton et al, 1998 ;Kerns et al, 2008 ). The results of this study further support the notion that persons with MCI or early dementia, probably due to Alzheimer's disease, generally do not show marked decline in executive functioning in the early stages of their disease (Levinoff et al, 2006 ;Petersen et al, 1999 ). As expected, these patients predominantly showed a worse performance on the RAVLT ( Table 2 ).…”

Lexical retrieval in discourse: An early indicator of Alzheimer’s dementia

“…The presence of language impairment is evident in the symptomatic prodromal phase of AD, as well. These earliest stages have been labeled ‘preclinical’ (Clark et al, 2009; Jacobs et al, 1995; Mickes et al, 2007; Saxton et al, 2004), ‘incipient’ (Rubin et al, 1998), ‘minimal’ (Forbes, Shanks, & Venneri, 2004) or ‘mild cognitive impairment’ (MCI) (Albert et al, 2011; Levinoff et al, 2006; Petersen et al, 1999; Östberg, Fernaeus, Hellström, Bogdanović, & Wahlund, 2005). …”

“…Cross-sectional (Levinoff et al, 2006) as well as longitudinal (Jacobs et al, 1995; Rubin et al, 1998) studies have demonstrated that confrontation naming performance measured by the Boston Naming Test (BNT; Kaplan, Goodglass, & Weintraub, 1983) was significantly worse among even those individuals who had MCI, than among matched healthy controls. Individuals who develop AD have demonstrated lexical retrieval deficits on a confrontation naming task 2–3 years prior to diagnosis (Chen et al, 2001; Mickes et al, 2007), as well as exhibiting a steady decline in confrontation naming ability during the progression of the disease once diagnosed (Locascio, Growdon, & Corkin, 1995; Salmon, Heindel, & Lange, 1999).…”

“…Studies examining letter fluency performance in individuals with MCI have revealed reductions as compared with healthy controls, both cross-sectionally (Clark et al, 2009; Doi, 2013; Levinoff et al, 2006; Nutter-Upham et al 2008; Östberg et al, 2005) and longitudinally (Chen et al, 2001; Clark et al, 2009; Grober et al, 2008). Individuals with mild AD perform worse than healthy elderly adults (Adlam et al, 2006; Clark et al, 2009; Groves-Wright, Neils-Strunjas, Burnett, & O'Neill, 2004; Levinoff et al, 2006) and individuals with MCI (Adlam et al, 2006; Clark et al, 2009).…”

How many segments are there in an orange: normative data for the new Cognitive Estimation Task in an Italian population

“…Shallice and Evans [1] developed the first Cognitive Estimation Task (CET) in an attempt to assess these cognitive abilities, many of which are executive in nature. Other CET versions have been developed subsequently for administration in other countries [2][3][4][5]; nowadays it is a widely used test of executive function [6] in neurological and psychiatric conditions Recently, MacPherson et al [7] devised an up-to-date version of the CET providing two parallel forms with 9 questions related to landmarks, people and objects that individuals from all countries should be familiar with. This new version permits repeated assessment of cognitive estimation abilities in both clinical and experimental settings (e.g., before and after a rehabilitation or pharmacological program).…”