Language comprehension profiles in Alzheimer's disease, multi-infarct dementia, and frontotemporal degeneration

• DOI: 10.1212/wnl.47.1.183
• Publication Date: 2012-05-13T13:21:25Z
• Authors: M. Grossman; M. D'Esposito; E. Hughes; K. Onishi; N. Biassou; T. White-Devine; K. M. Robinson
• Keywords: Basal (medicine)

We assessed language functioning in 116 age-, education-, and severity-matched patients with the clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD), multi-infarct dementia (MID) due to small-vessel ischemic disease, or a frontotemporal form degeneration (FD). Assessments comprehension revealed that AD are significantly impaired their judgments single word picture meaning, whereas FD had sentence difficulty processing grammatical phrase structure. Patients MID did not differ from control subjects performance. Traditional aphasiologic measures distinguish between AD, MID, FD. Selective patterns different forms emphasize deficits cannot be explained entirely by compromised memory associated progressive neurodegenerative illness.