Department of Neuropsychiatry, Seoul National University Bundang Hospital, Seongnam, Korea.
Psychiatry Investig. 2012 Mar;9(1):59-64. doi: 10.4306/pi.2012.9.1.59. Epub 2012 Jan 9.
We investigated neuropsychological markers that can be used to discriminate pathological cognitive aging from normal cognitive aging.
We administered frontal lobe function tests including the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST), digit span test, lexical fluency test, fixed condition design fluency test, and Trail Making Test B (TMT-B) to 92 individuals with pathological cognitive aging (PCA) and 222 individuals with normal cognitive aging (NCA). We examined the main effects of participants' diagnoses (PCA, NCA) and age (65-69 years old, 70-74 years old and 75 years old or over) on their test performance using multivariate analysis of variance.
The main effects of both the diagnosis (F=2.860, p=0.002) and the age group (F=2.484, p<0.001) were significant. The PCA group showed lower performance on the backward digit span test (F=14.306, p<0.001), fixed condition design fluency test (F=8.347, p=0.004) and also exhibited perseverative errors in the WCST (F=4.19, p=0.042) compared with the NCA group. The main effect of the diagnosis on the backward digit span test and the fixed condition design fluency test remained significant after Bonferroni correction. The main effect of age remained significant in the TMT-B (F=8.737, p<0.001) after Bonferroni correction. Other test scores were not influenced by diagnosis or age.
The design fluency task may be a good neuropsychological marker to assess pathological cognitive aging.
我们研究了可用于区分病理性认知老化和正常认知老化的神经心理学标志物。
我们对 92 例病理性认知老化（PCA）患者和 222 例正常认知老化（NCA）患者进行了额叶功能测试，包括威斯康星卡片分类测试（WCST）、数字跨度测试、词汇流畅性测试、固定条件设计流畅性测试和连线测试 B（TMT-B）。我们使用多元方差分析检查了参与者的诊断（PCA、NCA）和年龄（65-69 岁、70-74 岁和 75 岁及以上）对其测试表现的主要影响。
诊断（F=2.860，p=0.002）和年龄组（F=2.484，p<0.001）的主效应均显著。PCA 组在后向数字跨度测试（F=14.306，p<0.001）、固定条件设计流畅性测试（F=8.347，p=0.004）和 WCST 中表现出更多的持续错误（F=4.19，p=0.042），与 NCA 组相比。经过 Bonferroni 校正后，诊断对后向数字跨度测试和固定条件设计流畅性测试的主效应仍然显著。TMT-B 的年龄主效应在 Bonferroni 校正后仍然显著（F=8.737，p<0.001）。其他测试分数不受诊断或年龄的影响。
设计流畅性任务可能是评估病理性认知老化的良好神经心理学标志物。
