| Cognitive impairment in the elderly suffering from degenerative brain disease (Alzheimer's Disease and Multi-infarct Dementia), and Depression is the focus of this study. The rationale of this research was based upon the difficulty in differential diagnosis of dementia and depression due to their overlapping symptoms. A comprehensive neuropsychological test, The Luria-Nebraska Neuropsychological Battery (LNNB) (Golden et al., 1980) was used to examine the neuro-psychological functioning of the above-mentioned patient groups. Four other tests commonly employed for assessing brain impairment were also used: Halstead-Wepman Aphasia Screening Test, Trail Making Test, Wechsler Memory Scale, and Wisconsin Card Sorting Battery. The normal comparison consisted of elderly persons from two age groups: (a) young elderly (55 to 74), and (b) old elderly (75 and over).;It was hypothesized that the elderly suffering from Alzheimer's Disease (AD), Multi-infarct Dementia (MID) and Depression (DEP) would show significant neuropsychological impairment on the tests. Specifically, it was expected that the AD patients would show global and uniform impairment on all neuropsychological measures, whereas the MID patients would show focal and localized impairment. Compared to the AD and MID patients, the depressed elderly were expected to perform better on all tests. No significant difference between the normal young elderly and normal old elderly was expected.;The results show that the AD and MID groups performed significantly worse (p $<$.0005) on all neuropsychological measures compared to the normal controls and the depressives. As expected, none of the obtained scores of the DEP group fell in the organic range, although compared to the normal control groups, the depressed patients performed poorly on most neuropsychological measures. The expectation that the AD and the MID groups would perform significantly differently was not confirmed. In fact, both the groups revealed similar patterns of test performance. As expected, the performance of the old elderly and the young elderly did not fall in the impaired range. There were few differences in the normal controls on the basis of age. Thus, the neuropsychological tests did differentiate the dementia groups from the depressive group, but failed to differentiate the two dementia groups (AD and MID). |
