The number of people living with Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is projected to
increase dramatically over the next few decades, making the search for treatments and
tools to measure the progression of AD increasingly urgent. The antisaccade task, a
hands- and language-free metric, may provide a functional index of the Dorsolateral
Prefrontal Cortex (DLPFC), which is damaged in the later stages of AD. Patients with
AD make significantly more antisaccade errors than controls, however, performance in
mild AD has remained unexplored. We hypothesized that mild patients will make more
errors than controls. Thirty AD patients and 31 age-match controls completed both
laptop-based and clinical versions of the antisaccade task. Two thirds of patients with AD
made significantly more errors and corrected less of their errors than age-matched
controls. Our findings indicate that antisaccade impairments exist in mild AD, suggesting
DLPFC pathology may be present earlier than suggested by previous studies.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/17185 |
| Date | 24 February 2009 |
| Creators | Kaufman-Simpkins, Liam |
| Contributors | Black, Sandra |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 1316218 bytes, application/pdf |
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