| Summary: | 碩士 === 中原大學 === 心理學研究所 === 95 === Background and Purpose：Early detection of senile dementia has important clinical value. Education had a strong effect on the conventional cognitive screening test, such as Cognitive Abilities Screening Instrument and Mini-Mental State Examination. Previous research showed that information processing speed, working memory, and recent memory had most prominent declines in the early stage of dementia, and were less influenced by education. The purposes of this study are (1) to exam the performance on information processing speed and working memory in Alzheimer's disease（AD） patients with different educational levels, (2) to find the cognitive tests that can find the best prediction the diagnosis of AD, and (3) to compare the discriminative power in different educational levels of patients with the diagnosis of dementia .
Method： Twenty-eight who were patients diagnosed with mild AD and 28 age-matched control subjects participated in the study. Clinical diagnosis of dementia was made by consensus committee using DSM-IV criteria. Severity of dementia was staged using the Clinical Dementia Rating Scale (CDR). These participants were involved in schooling in the low education group for six years or less and for more than six years in the high education group. They underwent neuropsychological evaluations using the Color Trails Test（CTT）, Digit Symbol, Spatial Span（SS）, Digit Span（DS）, Word List subtest of the Weschler Memory Scale-III, and MMSE. Two by two two-way ANOVA were conducted to compare the performance between normal control and dementia patients, and between patients with low verse high educational levels. Discriminate analyze were also conducted to will evaluate how well a brief battery of tests could discriminate mildly demented persons from normal aged.
Results： The results indicate that the patients with AD performed significantly more poorly than normal controls on all the neuropsychological tests as well as MMSE. Education did not show an effect on most of the neuropsychological tests for patient with early stage of AD. The discriminate analysis revealed that the CTT, Word Lists II are the better predictive tests in the Alzheimer’s disease..
Conclusion：The findings suggest that information processing and working memory are impaired at early stage of AD. MMSE and CTT showed better predictive power in the differentiation of AD from normal participants than the MMSE.
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