Oosterman Joukje M, Sergeant Joseph A, Weinstein Henry C, Scherder Erik J A
Department of Clinical Neuropsychology, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Rev Neurosci. 2004;15(6):439-62. doi: 10.1515/revneuro.2004.15.6.439.
The present article reviews recent studies of 'healthy aging' with and without cardiovascular risk factors and accompanying white matter changes. Specifically, the relationship between white matter hyperintensities (WMH) and various cognitive functions, in particular executive functions (EF), was subjected to meta-analysis. The results of this analysis indicate that WMH induce a decrease in performance on timed EF tests, while the more basic cognitive abilities (e.g. short-term memory and vocabulary) remained relatively intact. Interestingly, the performance on untimed EF tasks was uniformly unrelated to WMH. This pattern of cognitive dysfunction was observed equally in the 'healthy aged' and the cardiovascular group. These findings suggest that an important distinction exists between untimed and timed EF tests, and that this distinction should be taken into account when interpreting the results of such tests.
本文回顾了近期关于有或没有心血管危险因素及伴随脑白质变化的“健康衰老”的研究。具体而言，对脑白质高信号（WMH）与各种认知功能，特别是执行功能（EF）之间的关系进行了荟萃分析。该分析结果表明，WMH会导致定时EF测试的表现下降，而更基本的认知能力（如短期记忆和词汇）仍相对完好。有趣的是，不定时EF任务的表现与WMH始终无关。在“健康老年人”和心血管疾病组中均观察到这种认知功能障碍模式。这些发现表明，不定时和定时EF测试之间存在重要区别，在解释此类测试结果时应考虑到这一区别。
