Severity of cognitive impairment in Alzheimer's disease affects list learning using the California verbal learning test (CVLT)
✍ Scribed by Lauren S. Fox; Assistant Professor Jason T. Olin; Joel Erblich; Chandra Ghosh Ippen; Professor Lon S. Schneider
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1998
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 118 KB
- Volume
- 13
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0885-6230
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Impairment in list learning is considered a primary symptom of Alzheimer's disease (AD), yet there are no published reports examining the relationship between list learning and severity of cognitive impairment. We gave nine-item and 16-item versions of the California Verbal Learning Test (CVLT;Delis et al., 1987), a standardized shopping list assessment of memory, to 24 AD patients (mean age 76.2+ 8.1; mean years of education 13.8+ 2.4), who were strati®ed into four groups based on MMSE scores (mean 16.0+ 5.6). ANOVAs revealed severity eects for total list learning (p 5 0.001), the ®rst trial (p 5 0.001), the last trial (p 5 0.001) and short-and long-delay recall measures. Most of these dierences seemed due to ¯oor eects. For example, the modal number of words recalled after a delay was 0 by subjects with MMSE scores below 21. Severity of cognitive impairment was associated with the proportion of intrusions such that the most severely demented subjects gave almost entirely intrusion responses. Surprisingly, list length did not signi®cantly aect any of the free recall measures. Our results suggest that list learning and recall seem to be lost relatively early in AD. Measures of list recall like the CVLT may not be useful in tracking severity of cognitive impairment over time.