The differential diagnosis of dementia using P300 latency

Latency variability of the components of auditory event-related potentials to infrequent stimuli in aging, Alzheimer-type dementia, and depression

“…There are several differences among studies which may account, in part, for the conflicting results, including task requirements and severity and etiology of the demented patients. As an indication that procedural factors may affect estimates of the sensitivity of P300, Gordon et al (1986) replicated the counting task used by Squires et al (1980) and obtained a similar percentage (80%) of correct classifications of demented subjects. Other studies which have used counting tasks have observed similar abnormality rates (Brown et al 1982;Syndulko et al 1982).…”

Auditory Event-Related Potentials in Different Types of Dementia

“…The P3 latencies showed significant age dependences, but the slope of the age-latency regression line (0.55 ms/year) was not as steep as usually reported [11,[17][18][19]. Nevertheless, Gordon et al [7] reported for their control sample as a whole a slope of the P3 agelatency regression line of 0.9 ms/year, which is similar to our value; they even calculated two separate regression lines for the subjects below and above 63 years of age. The slope of the former (the majority of controls and patients in our study fell in that category) was even closer to our result, i.e.…”

“…Dementia is also seen in neurological disorders that involve predominantly subcortical structures as the brainstem and basal ganglia, exemplified in Parkinson's disease (PD) [1,2] and Huntington's chorea (HD) [3], Although qualitative differences in cognitive functioning have been described between 'cortical' and 'subcortical' dementias [3], the nature of these differences, if any, is controversial [4], Among the electrophysiological correlates of demen tia, the event-related potentials, generated in response to infrequent, attended, task-relevant stimuli, are consid ered to reflect some, still undetermined, aspects of the cognitive processing [5][6][7], The latency of the P3 (or P300) component of event-related potentials was shown in a number of studies to correlate well with the cogni tive capabilities and to increase with age and in patients with dementing illness [8,9], However, particularly in triguing were the findings of Goodin and Aminoff [10,11] that, although the N2 and P3 components of audi tory event-related potentials (aERPs) were prolonged in latency among patients with dementia caused by DAT, PD and HD, the latencies of the N1 and P2 components differed between the groups. While they were normal in DAT patients, the N 1 latencies were prolonged in those with HD and PD, whereas P2 was prolonged only in the group with HD.…”

Effect of Surgical Menopause on Cognitive Functions

“…Review of the literature on P300 reveals no studies measuring such changes in surgically menopausal women. However, the association between P300 latency and the level of mental disability from dementia has been observed in ERP studies in a wide variety of neurological patient populations [24][25][26]. Also, other reports have noted significant success at discriminating between patients in early stage of AD and normal matched controls, suggesting that P3 may be a useful tool for the study of this type of dementia [27].…”