Neuropsychological deficits among patients with late-onset minor and major depression

Abstract

Cognitive ability of minor depressed patients (N=28), major depressed patients (N=26) and healthy elderly (N=38) was examined cross-sectionally to determine if cognitive abilities of patients with late-onset depression decrease with increasing severity of disease and if cognitive scores for minor depressed patients fall between those of healthy elderly and major depressed patients. A pooled within-group principal component analysis of cognitive test scores identified five components, three of which showed significant group differences. Verbal Recall and Maintenance of Set separated controls from major depressed patients and minor from major depressed patients. Executive Functioning separated controls from minor depressed patients, and Working Memory was borderline for separating controls from major depressed patients. The component representing Nonverbal Recognition was not statistically significant. Partial correlations controlling for age and education indicate that cognitive performance does decrease as severity of depression increases, and the magnitude of the change varies from a trend to a significant deficit depending on the cognitive domain. This decline in cognitive performance parallels a similar trend observed in neuroanatomical studies in which the volume of the frontal and temporal lobes decrease with increasing severity of depression.

Executive Dysfunction, Heart Disease Burden, and Remission of Geriatric Depression

“…Executive dysfunction, including disturbances in response inhibition and initiation as well as perseveration have been reported in late-life depression (Elderkin-Thompson et al, 2003;Lockwood et al, 2002;Nebes et al, 2001). Studies of cognitive response to psychopharmacological treatment of late-life depression indicate that executive function deficits persist after remission of geriatric depression (Nebes et al, 2003;Butters et al, 2000).…”

Emotional Experience and the Mood-Congruent Working Memory Effect in First-Onset and Untreated Depressive Disorder Patients

“…Some studies have found that the working memory performance of depressive patients was impaired [2,5,6]. The reason for these inconsistent results is that, in this study, to investigate the working memory performance of depressive patients, firstly, we used pictures instead of words because vocabulary is more closely linked with educational level than pictures; this way, the influence of educational-level factors could be excluded as much as possible; secondly, some studies thought that the working memory performance of depressive patients would diminish along with an increase in task difficulty [5,36,37]. Memory difficulty is one of the main factors that influence memory performance.…”

Mood, cognition and in vivo protein imaging: the emerging nexus in clinical neuroscience

“…Deficits have been reported in domains of attention, language, episodic recall, semantic recall, nonverbal recall, visuospatial/visuoconstruction, working memory, and executive function (Abas et al, 1990;King et al, 1991;Boone et al, 1994;Boone et al, 1995;Lesser et al, 1996;Palmer et al, 1996;Kramer-Ginsberg et al, 1999;Lyness et al, 1999;Yaffe et al, 1999;Nebes et al, 2000;Palsson et al, 2000;Nebes et al, 2001b;Swainson et al, 2001;Elderkin-Thompson et al, 2003;Elderkin-Thompson et al, 2004b). Specifically, they have reduced language fluency (Wolfe et al, 1987;King et al, 1991;Boone et al, 1994;Brown et al, 1994;Palmer et al, 1996), poor processing speed and attentional ability (Boone et al, 1995;Yaffe et al, 1999;Nebes et al, 2000;Palsson et al, 2000;Nebes et al, 2001a), poor inhibition of conflicting information (Palmer et al, 1996), and impaired visuospatial skills (Boone et al, 1994;Boone et al, 1995;Lesser et al, 1996).…”