Cannatà A P, Alberoni M, Franceschi M, Mariani C
Department of Neurology, Clinica Zucchi, Carate Brianza, Italy.
Dement Geriatr Cogn Disord. 2002;13(2):101-11. doi: 10.1159/000048641.
We compared the performance of patients with Alzheimer's disease to that of patients with subcortical vascular dementia (s-IVD) in a set of tasks assessing categorization abilities, sustained and selective attention, and set-shifting and set-maintaining skills. Only the measures of naming and categorization abilities on the Test of Classification and Recall of Pictures (TCRP) proved useful in differentiating AD from s-IVD patients. s-IVD patients showed worse performance than AD on the TCRP categorization measures, while both AD and s-IVD patients were equally impaired in other tasks assessing executive functions (EF). With respect to the naming task, s-IVD patients made significantly more perseverative and unrelated errors than AD patients. Moreover, in the s-IVD group, we found a strong correlation between categorization ability and an attentional test score (Attentional Matrices), while no such correlation emerged in the AD group. These results suggest a dissociated impairment of EF in the 2 dementia groups. In our view, the lack of inhibition and the inability to manipulate complex information are responsible for a greater executive dysfunction in s-IVD patients in comparison with AD patients. The capacity to build up strategies appears more preserved in AD patients, whose impaired performance in executive tasks seems to be related to an impairment of attentional shifting and working memory.
我们在一系列评估分类能力、持续和选择性注意力以及转换和维持任务集技能的任务中，比较了阿尔茨海默病患者与皮质下血管性痴呆（s-IVD）患者的表现。只有图片分类与回忆测试（TCRP）中的命名和分类能力测量结果被证明有助于区分AD患者和s-IVD患者。在TCRP分类测量中，s-IVD患者的表现比AD患者差，而在其他评估执行功能（EF）的任务中，AD患者和s-IVD患者的受损程度相当。在命名任务方面，s-IVD患者比AD患者出现更多的持续性错误和无关错误。此外，在s-IVD组中，我们发现分类能力与一项注意力测试分数（注意力矩阵）之间存在很强的相关性，而在AD组中未出现这种相关性。这些结果表明这两个痴呆组的EF存在分离性损害。我们认为，与AD患者相比，s-IVD患者缺乏抑制能力且无法处理复杂信息，这导致了更严重的执行功能障碍。AD患者构建策略的能力似乎保存得更好，其在执行任务中的受损表现似乎与注意力转移和工作记忆受损有关。
