The present study compared two groups of community-bound persons, over 55 years old, who had sustained deterioration of cognitive and behavioral skills for over 6 months. These changes had been medically diagnosed as either Senile Dementia of the Alzheimer's Type (SDAT) or Multi-Infarct Dementia (MID). There were 15 subjects in each group. All participants were relatively free of any known psychiatric or medical disorder, outside the presumptive dementia condition. / A profile of these groups' performance on physiological, behavioral, and psychometric measures was obtained. Physiological measures, EEG(P300) and CT Scan, confirmed the presence of neurological changes in 28 subjects; abnormal patterns in the EEG(P300) were also positively related to the subjects' age. Functional deficits, rated by the caregivers, increased proportional to the length of time since onset of the illness. Descriptively, within the first three years of the illness, the SDAT group preserved self-care skills longer than the MID group, while the latter maintained their communication skills at the pre-morbid functional levels. Neuropsychological data were obtained in six areas, including orientation, memory, abstraction, judgment, visual-motor coordination, and language. Significant differences were noted in recent memory, concentration, comparative judgment, and processing of specified words. / A linear discriminant analysis identified the psychometric and behavioral scales most sensitive to the differentiation of SDAT and MID conditions. The resulting brief but thorough screening scale showed a predictive and reliability coefficient above chance. Data also indicated a physician's bias in rating the level of cognitive functioning of the SDAT group. The SDAT subjects, who were older, were rated as more cognitively impaired than the MID subjects, who were younger. There were no significant differences between these groups in the length of time since onset of dementia. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 49-03, Section: B, page: 0910. / Major Professor: Lloyd F. Elfner. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1987.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_76249 |
| Contributors | Corvea, Martha Haydee., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 181 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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