Neural correlates of the components of the clock drawing test

Abstract

Various brain regions were associated with each component of the CDT. These results suggest that an assessment of these components is useful for the detection of localization of brain damage.

Mild Cognitive Impairment in newly diagnosed Parkinson's disease: A longitudinal prospective study

“…Instead, other tests considered to tap frontal functions, i.e. clock drawing or semantic fluency, also rely on activation of more anterior regions of the frontal lobes and of posterior regions of temporal cortex [38,39], thus resulting less reliable to predict progression to PD-MCI.…”

Drawing Disorders in Alzheimer’s Disease and Other Forms of Dementia

“…Using appropriate error classification criteria, error analysis in CDT might be useful to differentiate different types of dementia, since conceptual errors are quite frequent in AD [64], but in a recent longitudinal study conceptual errors and perseverations were more frequently observed in the advanced stages of all dementing diseases, whereas spatial and planning errors were more frequent in mild-tomoderate dementia [65]. Errors in setting numbers and clock hands seem to correlate with regional hypometabolism in bilateral parietal and posterior temporal areas and in the right middle frontal gyrus [58]. By the same token, it has been recently observed that different types of errors in demented patients' performance on CDT might correlate with atrophy in different brain regions, within frontal, parietal and temporal lobes [66].…”

“…In a large sample of AD patients, Shon et al [120] found that drawing from memory or copying a clock face correlated with regional glucose metabolism in bilateral temporo-parietal regions, but these correlations changed as a function of dementia severity. Matsuoka et al [58] reported another representative instance of variability in neurofunctional findings depending on the neuropsychological measure in a large sample of drug-naïve AD patients, in whom overall performance on CDT, the partial score on locating numbers of the clock and the partial score on setting the hands were correlated with atrophy in distinct parietal, posterior temporal and frontal regions. A PET study using copying of simple geometrical figure as a measure of constructional abilities showed, instead, an exclusive correlation of copying performance with the left inferior parietal lobule and the left inferior frontal gyrus [121].…”

“…Many administration procedures and scoring systems have been proposed [54][55][56][57], but there is no consensus as to which is the most useful for dementia screening [20,54]. The scoring systems share commonalities, but each may reflect different cognitive components and be correlated with different areas of brain atrophy [58]. However, independently from the scoring procedure, performance on CDT in demented patients seems to be inversely correlated with lesion load in medial temporal lobe, in subcortical structures and in periventricular white matter [59,60] and might provide prognostic information for cognitive decline [61,62].…”

Correlation of Visuospatial Ability and EEG Slowing in Patients with Parkinson’s Disease

“…PD-patients with a flawless CDT-performance did not show this association (see Figure 2). The neuroanatomical correlates of Clock Drawing Test performance were investigated in several studies, but the findings are inconsistent [49–52]. This discrepancy might probably stem from the fact that the Clock Drawing Test measures also executive function, numerical and verbal memory, and visuospatial ability [34, 53].…”