Lee Andy C H, Rahman Shibley, Hodges John R, Sahakian Barbara J, Graham Kim S
MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, 15 Chaucer Road, Cambridge CB2 2EF,UK.
Eur J Neurosci. 2003 Sep;18(6):1660-70. doi: 10.1046/j.1460-9568.2003.02883.x.
It has been demonstrated that patients with dementia of the Alzheimer's type show particular difficulties with a task that measures memory for object locations [R. Swainson et al. (2001) Dement. Geriatr. Cogn. Disord. 12, 265-80]. The present study followed on from this report by asking whether the deficits seen in dementia of the Alzheimer's type were specific to this condition, or whether they would also be seen in another common neurodegenerative syndrome, frontotemporal dementia. To investigate this important issue, we examined memory for object-location pairs and visual recognition memory for novel patterns using two tests, the Paired Associates Learning and Matching to Sample tasks, from the Cambridge Neuropsychological Testing Automated Battery. The performance of a subset of the patients with dementia of the Alzheimer's type described by Swainson et al., selected on the basis of age and education, was compared with matched groups of frontal variant frontotemporal dementia, semantic dementia and control subjects. In contrast to the patients with dementia of the Alzheimer's type, who showed significant impairment on both memory tests, the two frontotemporal dementia groups did not perform significantly poorer compared with control subjects on nearly all memory measures, other than 'memory score' from the paired associates learning task. These findings confirm that tests of episodic memory, especially for the location of objects in space, may be useful in the early diagnosis and differentiation of dementia of the Alzheimer's type.
已有研究表明，阿尔茨海默病型痴呆患者在一项测量物体位置记忆的任务中表现出特别的困难[R. 斯温森等人（2001年）《痴呆与老年认知障碍》12卷，第265 - 280页]。本研究继该报告之后展开，探究阿尔茨海默病型痴呆中所见的缺陷是否为此病症所特有，或者在另一种常见的神经退行性综合征——额颞叶痴呆中是否也会出现。为调查这一重要问题，我们使用剑桥神经心理测试自动成套测验中的两项测试，即配对联想学习和样本匹配任务，来检查物体位置对的记忆以及对新图案的视觉识别记忆。将斯温森等人所描述的阿尔茨海默病型痴呆患者中的一个子集（根据年龄和教育程度选取）的表现，与额颞叶痴呆额叶变异型、语义性痴呆的匹配组以及对照组受试者进行比较。与在两项记忆测试中均表现出显著损伤的阿尔茨海默病型痴呆患者不同，除了配对联想学习任务中的“记忆分数”外，两个额颞叶痴呆组在几乎所有记忆指标上与对照组受试者相比，表现并无显著更差。这些发现证实，情景记忆测试，尤其是对空间中物体位置的测试，可能有助于阿尔茨海默病型痴呆的早期诊断和鉴别。
