The characteristics of tool use in people with Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment: A view from the perspective of praxis

• Main Authors: Song Yang Ho, 何頌揚
• Other Authors: L. F. Meng
• Format: Others
• Published: 2014
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/30463448153142739349

碩士 === 長庚大學 === 職能治療學系 === 102 === Although one of the important clinical features in mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the difficulty in tool use, the characteristics of tool use in people with AD and MCI were reported inconsistently among literatures. The aim of this study was to investigate the characteristics of tool use in patients with MCI and mild AD based on praxis model. Totally 62 participants from age 65-93 were recruited and grouped according to their scores of mini-mental status examination (MMSE), the Montreal cognitive assessment (MoCA) and clinical dementia rating (CDR). Furthermore, praxis tasks of dependent variables and some neurobehavioral variables treated as controlled variables were examined. Finally, results of 18 patients with MCI, 18 patients with mild AD and 18 age, gender and education matched healthy controls (HC) were reported in this thesis. In the production system test, no significant differences were found between the HC and MCI, but mild AD was significantly worse than the HC and MCI. In the conceptual system test, HC performed better than the MCI, and MCI performed better than the mild AD. Furthermore, no significant correlation was found between the scores of the production system test and conceptual system test in MCI and mild AD, but significant in HC. This research provides evidence that the production and the conceptual system are dissociated in MCI and mild AD. Moreover, production and conceptual system are both impaired in mild AD whereas production system is intact but with impaired conceptual system in MCI.