Journal

The Japanese journal of neuropsychology

[Vol.25 No.1 contents]
Japanese/English

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ArticleTitle The performance of verbal fluency task in amnestic MCI and mild AD -A comparison of other tests of language function-
Language J
AuthorList Hyunjoo Choi1), Kenichi Meguro1)2), Kotaro Hiraoka1), Kazumi Hirayama1), Etsuro Mori1)
Affiliation 1)Department of Behavioral Neurology and Cognitive Neuroscience, Tohoku University Graduate School of Medicine
2)Currently, Department of Geriatric Behavioral Neurology, Tohoku University Graduate School of Medicine
Publication Japanese Journal of Neuropsychology: 25 (1), 57-63, 2009
Received Feb 19, 2008
Accepted Jun 4, 2008
Abstract To elucidate the earliest changes of language function in subjects with Alzheimer's disease, performances on the one-minute verbal fluency task (semantic category: animal, phonetic category: initial syllable /fu/, /a/, and /ni/) were compared between patients with amnestic type of mild cognitive impairment (MCI, n=23) or mild Alzheimer's disease (AD, n=30) and healthy elderly controls (n=20). In order to compare the performances of verbal fluency and other language tests , we administered the Communicative Abilities in Daily Living (CADL), confrontation naming test (Test of Lexical Processing in Aphasia: TLPA), and The results were following: 1) Performances of the MCI group showed the comparable to the controls on the CADL and confrontation naming test, 2) Performances of the semantic category fluency showed significant differences between the groups, with the control group scoring best followed by the amnestic MCI group and mild AD group. In the phonetic category fluency task, the performances of the control group were better than those of the amnestic MCI and mild AD groups, but no significant differences were shown between amnestic MCI and mild AD group. In conclusion, this study demonstrates that the verbal fluency task can sensitively detect language deficits in amnestic MCI and mild AD, although it is very quick and simple. We identified that language deficits of patients with MCI and mild AD would be more readily identified in verbal fluency tasks rather than in the aphasic tests such as the CADL and confrontation naming test.
Keywords amnestic MCI, Alzheimer's disease, verbal fluency, language disorder

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