Reading and writing habits as a predictor of verbal fluency in elders.

Abstract

Introduction: Semantic and phonemic verbal fluency tasks are the most used verbal fluency versions to evaluate dementia patients, while unconstrained and action fluencies have been poorly investigated in aging. This study aimed to evaluate if the factors diagnosis, age, and reading and writing habits can predict the performance of four types of verbal fluency in healthy elderly (HE), mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) participants. Method: Eighty participants were included in this study (21 mild AD, 32 MCI, and 27 HE). The participants performed a reading and writing habits questionnaire, neuropsychological evaluation, and semantic, phonemic, unconstrained, and action verbal fluency tasks. Diagnosis, age, and reading and writing habits were entered as predictors in a stepwise linear regression model for each of the four verbal fluency tasks. Results: The stepwise procedure eliminated age for all models as being nonsignificant. Unconstrained and semantic verbal fluency were better predicted by the diagnosis followed by reading and writing habits. On the other hand, phonemic and action verbal fluency were better predicted by reading and writing habits followed by diagnosis. Conclusion: Reading and writing habits contributed to the prediction of all verbal fluency tasks, highlighting their role in cognitive function. The sensitivity of these verbal fluency tasks to sociocultural and clinical factors should be considered in the neuropsychological assessment.

Neural Correlates of Verb Fluency Performance in Cognitively Healthy Older Adults and Individuals With Dementia: A Pilot fMRI Study

“…Thus, various brain areas responsible for these cognitive processes would need to be actively recruited when a person performs a verbal fluency task, and our current finding of a contribution from the hippocampus as a "nonlanguage" structure (Glikmann-Johnston et al, 2015) is not unexpected. For example, medial temporal lobe (MTL) and adjacent areas have been reported to be integral to semantic networks, and activations in these regions have been found to be significantly associated with semantic fluency performance given their role in extracting information from semantic storage (Pihlajamäki et al, 2000;Glikmann-Johnston et al, 2015;Kochhann et al, 2018;Nikolai et al, 2018). In the current study, the upregulation of MTL and related regions in those who showed poorer verb fluency performance may have been due to the concurrent recruitment of brain areas responsible for language and cognitive abilities (Li et al, 2017), which are important for fluency.…”

“…All of these tasks require continued, effortful retrieval of distinct lexical items under certain restrictions (e.g., words that belong to a certain category or begin with a specific letter) in a given time period, with subtle differences among the different fluency tasks in terms of what cognitive components support their performance (see Henry et al, 2004 for a review). For instance, verb fluency (originally referred to as action fluency; see Piatt et al, 1999 for validity;Woods et al, 2005 for normative data) appears sensitive to cognitive deficits stemming from frontal-striatal impairments (Kochhann et al, 2018). Indeed, individuals with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or subjective cognitive decline (SCD) have been found to show impaired verb fluency performance (Östberg et al, 2005Forlenza et al, 2012;Alegret et al, 2018;Macoir et al, 2019) as have individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD; Östberg et al, 2007;McDowd et al, 2011;Beber et al, 2015;Dubois et al, 2016;Alegret et al, 2018) and individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) dementia (Piatt et al, 1999).…”

“…Brain imaging is commonly utilized as a biomarker for the detection of dementing, neurodegenerative diseases as well as to monitor disease progression, and biomarkers using functional MRI have been regarded useful in the diagnosis and intervention of dementia with substantial implications in delineating neuropathological changes (Gold and Budson, 2008;McKhann et al, 2011;Li et al, 2015;Bayram et al, 2018). Currently, however, there has been limited examination of how brains with neurodegenerative disease operate in relation to language and cognitive deficits (Szatloczki et al, 2015;Li et al, 2017;Kochhann et al, 2018). In particular, nominal research has focused on the neurophysiological correlates of impaired verbal fluency performance in the dementia population, despite the sensitivity, and popularity of verbal fluency tasks.…”

“…To date, nevertheless, there has been little fMRI research investigating the neural mechanisms supporting verb fluency task performance (Kochhann et al, 2018), and the literature is even more scarce regarding the population with dementia. The current literature for verb fluency in healthy populations or people with epilepsy indicates that the generation of verbs involves frontalstriatal areas including basal ganglia, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and left inferior frontal gyrus (Sanjuán et al, 2010;Benjamin, 2014).…”

Verbal fluency in Alzheimer’s disease and mild cognitive impairment in individuals with low educational level and its relationship with reading and writing habits

“…A recent investigation also found that FRWH predicted the performance of all fluency tasks in a sample similar to the one in this study. 22 To the best of our knowledge, no research has compared clustering and switching in VF tasks in individuals with cognitive decline and healthy controls who have a low educational levels, correlating the results to FRWH. In addition, VF has been mainly explored considering the total score of valid words.…”