Discriminability in Recognition Memory in Amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment and Mild Alzheimer?s disease. A preliminary study.

162. RUSSO MJ; CAMPOS J; MARTIN M; CLARENS F; SABE L, AND ALLEGRI RF

CLINICAL NEUROPSYCHOLOGIST

TAYLOR & FRANCIS INC

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2014

1385-4046

Clinical memory tests that included a yes/no recognition format have provided scores only for the total number of target items correctly endorsed. However, many patients with mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer`s dementia present a strong ?yes? response bias in recognition tests, yielding both high hit and false alarm rates because they cannot reject distractor items. The objective of this study was to investigate recognition memory performance using a Recognition Discrimination Index in a sample of amnestic mild cognitive impairment (n = 45) and Alzheimer´s dementia (n = 51) participants and to compare this said sample with a control group (n = 43). All individuals were submitted to the Rey auditory verbal learning test and to an extensive battery of neuropsychological tests. The discrimination index showed that controls demonstrated better discrimination of the words from List A than the patients with mild cognitive impairment and dementia. Although both patient groups were impaired on total index and false alarms, the differences were not statistically significant. The results indicate that the discrimination index represents a useful measure in distinguishing the recognition performance of controls and patients. Implications of these results for clinical practice and theories of recognition memory such as marker of severity of the memory disorder are discussed.