Proper Names in Patients With Early Alzheimer’s Disease

Abstract

The objective of this study was to seek evidence of the particular sensitivity of proper name retrieval and to check the usefulness of proper names as diagnostic material in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Whether a generalized naming deficit is an early symptom of AD it is not yet clear. Previous studies suggest that proper names might be the category of names that is indeed more sensitive to AD. Seventy AD patients (subdivided into "very mild", "mild" and "moderate") and 47 control subjects participated in the study. The performances in two short distinct tests requiring proper name retrieval (Naming People on Definition and Naming Faces), one test of common name retrieval, short (MMSE, 3MS) and long (MODA) batteries for the detection of dementia were compared. Proper name retrieval tests were shown to be more sensitive to early AD than any other tests and batteries that failed to distinguish "very mild" AD from controls. These findings suggest that proper name retrieval tasks might be profitably included in diagnostic tools for the early diagnosis of AD.

Tip-of-the-tongue for proper names in mild cognitive impairment. Semantic or post-semantic impairments?

“…This may be interpreted as evidence supporting the hypothesis maintained by the latter authors that verbal free and cued recall deficits do not extend to proper name recall. The present findings do not therefore confirm that a-MCI subjects produced fewer errors and more "I don't know answers" than controls because of conservative responses, as suggested by Semenza et al (2003).…”

“…Like the MCI group studied by Semenza, Mondini, Borgo, Pasini, and Sgaramella (2003), the a-MCI subjects in the present study did not differ from control subjects as regard phonological access. This may be interpreted as evidence supporting the hypothesis maintained by the latter authors that verbal free and cued recall deficits do not extend to proper name recall.…”

“…We can conclude that failures in phonological access may be the main reason for the difficulty experienced by the mda-MCI subjects in the present study in recalling names of people, which also occurs in the early stages of AD (Ahmed et al, 2008;De Jaeger & Budge, 2005;Semenza, Borgo, Mondini, Pasini & Sgaramella, 2003;Thompson et al, 2002). In other words, naming of famous people in mda-MCI seems to be impaired in the activation of the form-based representations and not in the meaning-based representations.…”

“…Several researchers have found that difficulty in retrieving people's names is very common in the early stages of AD and is highly predictive of progress to AD in individuals with probable dementia (Ahmed, Arnold, Thompson, Graham, & Hodges, 2008;De Jaeger & Budge, 2005;Semenza, Borgo, Mondini, Pasini & Sgaramella, 2003;Thompson, Graham, Patterson, Sahakian, & Hodges, 2002). However, the nature of personal name deficits in AD and MCI remains to be fully investigated.…”

Desempenho de sujeitos com comprometimento cognitivo leve em tarefas de compressão textual

“…Na linguagem, são relatados comprometimentos na fluência verbal (Petersen et al, 1999;Bschor et al, 2001;Bennett et al, 2002;Dwolatzky et al, 2003;Geslani et al, 2005;Grundman et al, 2004;Ribeiro et al, 2006;Tabert et al, 2006), nomeação (Semenza et al, 2003), compreensão da linguagem (Ritchie et al, 2001), precisão de raciocínio sintático (Collie et al, 2002), e nomeação de palavras que rimam (Dwolatzky et al, 2003), decisão lexical (Taler;Jarema, 2006), categorização semântica (Olichney et al, 2002), codificação semântica (Puregger et al, 2003), priming semântico (Davie et al 2004), e alterações na produção e processamento receptivo no nível do discurso (Snowdon et al, 1996;Chapman et al, 2002;Forbes et al, 2002;Forbes et al, 2004;Forbes-McKay;Venneri, 2005;Riley et al, 2005;Garrard et al, 2006;Hudon et al 2006). …”