Written Spelling in Patients with Subcortical Vascular Dementia and Subcortical Vascular Mild Cognitive Impairment

Abstract

Objectives: The purpose of this study is to examine the spelling processing patterns in patients with subcortical vascular dementia (SVaD) and subcortical vascular mild cognitive impairment (svMCI).Methods: The subjects consisted of 10 patients with SVaD, 15with svMCI, and 30 normal controls (NC) subjects. Prior to this study, Korean- Mini Mental Status Examination (K-MMSE), Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA-K), and health screening questionnaires were conducted as pre-tests. After that, subjects were presented with 20 words grouped according to word type (regular word, irregular word, non-word), and then they were asked to dictate the words they heard. After the tests were completed, the number of correct responses and the number of error patterns were compared between groups.Results: First, by word type between groups, the svMCI and SVaD groups showed a significantly lower number of correct responses for regular and irregular words compared to the NC group. In addition, the SVaD group showed a significantly lower number of forward responses than the svMCI group in irregular words. Non-words showed significantly lower number of forward responses in the SVaD group compared to the NC and svMCI groups. Second, the comparison of the number of error types between groups showed a significant difference between the three groups in terms of grapheme substitution; and the SVaD group showed significantly more errors compared with the NC and svMCI groups in addition and omission of graphemes. Third, the SVaD group showed significantly more errors in comparison to the NC and svMCI groups for phonological implausible errors, and the svMCI and SVaD groups showed significantly more errors than the NC group for phonological plausible errors. Fourth, lexicalization errors within non-words were observed only in the SVaD group.Conclusion: For early detection of svMCI, it is necessary to pay attention to irregular word performance.