Prospective and retrospective memory in Alzheimer's disease and vascular dementia: similar patterns of impairment.

Prospective memory (ProM) involves remembering to perform actions after a delay, such as buying groceries on the way home from work. Retrospective memory (RetM) involves remembering events from the past. It is known that the memory impairment in Alzheimer's disease (AD) generalizes across (a) these two types of memory, and (b) encoding, storage, and retrieval within RetM. Corresponding knowledge regarding these issues is sparse in vascular dementia (VaD). The aim of this study was, therefore, to compare the two dementia etiologies regarding patterns of impairment in ProM and RetM tasks. From a population-based study, 21 persons with VaD, 79 with AD, and 352 controls were included. Both dementia groups were impaired on all ProM and RetM variables, but did not differ from one another on any measure. The results are discussed relative to a network view of episodic memory, in which alterations at different sites may result in similar functional impairments.