Biomedical subjects

G desRosiers

Publications and source records attributed to G desRosiers.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed1995

The neuropsychological differentiation of patients with very mild Alzheimer's disease and/or major depression.

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the usefulness of standardized neuropsychological tests in the psychometric differentiation of patients with very mild or mild Alzheimer's Disease (AD) and/or major depression presenting in a tertiary clinic with memory/attention complaints. DESIGN: Controlled prospective clinicoexperimental design. SETTING: Multidisciplinary Memory Clinic at Addenbroke's Hospital, Cambridge, England. PARTICIPANTS: Twenty-four patients with a clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (12 with major depression and 12 without), 12 patients with major depressive illness but without AD, and 12 healthy control subjects, all matched for age, sex, education levels, and estimates of premorbid intellectual potential. MEASUREMENTS: Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), Wechsler's Logical Memory (WLM) and Visual Reproduction (WVR), immediate and delayed reproduction, Wechsler's paired Associate Learning (WPAL), including the Easy and Hard subsets. Warrington's Recognition Memory for Faces (WRMF), Kendrick's Object Learning (KOLT) and Digit Copying (KDCT) Tests. OUTCOME MEASURES: Minimum 2-year follow-up diagnosis. RESULTS: Statistically, patients with very mild AD were distinguished clearly from those without AD on most tests of memory functions. Psychometrically, only KOLT and an index of retention on WLM and WVR were specific enough to avoid false positives, a requirement for second-stage tools. They also proved sensitive enough to suggest their role as first-stage instruments when screening for primary dementia in high-functioning patients scoring above the cut-point on MMSE. CONCLUSIONS: As efforts intensify to develop more powerful means to identify patients with Alzheimer's disease in its earliest stages, inclusion of specialist tests posing greater cognitive challenge than standard mental status scales has been one strategy. Our study explored how some of these neuropsychological tools behave psychometrically when analyzed on a single-case basis, and the results suggest a few are sensitive enough to boost detection above base rates alone while also being specific enough to reduce false alarms. Retention on Wechsler's Logical Memory and Visual Reproduction tasks and scores on Kendrick's Object Learning Test helped decrease the degree of ambiguity when cognitive profiles were used to distinguish depressed patients with Alzheimer disease from those without.

Aged↗

PubMed1992

Memory and hedonic tone: 'personality' or 'mood' congruence?

Four groups of healthy women matched for age and IQ were reliably classified on the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire as being either high or low in extraversion or neuroticism. As part of a larger research project, each participant was administered a range of psychometric measures together with three paired-associate learning lists varying in hedonic tone and difficulty levels together with the Beck Depression Inventory. Performance on the hedonic lists covaried with personality categories but, unlike what typically obtains in clinical patients, less association emerged between performance and mood states. Performance was particularly polarized in women scoring high in neuroticism but low in extraversion. Speculations about the apparent correlates of so-called mood congruence in healthy subjects are put forward and parallels are drawn with studies reporting the phenomenon in clinically depressed patients.

Affect↗

PubMed1988

Paired associate learning: form 1 and form 2 of the Wechsler Memory Scale.

Despite its popularity as a clinical measure, the paired Associate Learning (PAL) subtest of Wechsler's Memory Scale (WMS) still remains relatively undocumented for its psychometric properties. This article reports on the performance of 500 (form 1) and 600 (form 2) general medical patients hospitalized for other than neuropsychiatric conditions across five (20-69) and six (20-79) ten-year age bands respectively. In both alternate forms of PAL, strong age effects emerged while sex differences were more marked in form 2. Temporal reliability, assessed in separate student samples, proved adequate for either form. Parallel form correlations also indicated a moderate relationship between them. When easy and hard associates were analysed as separate measures with MANOVA the two forms were found to differ. Some possible reasons for these results are explored with respect to current information processing concepts postulated to affect verbal learning performance, and their utility in helping distinguish between pseudodementia and mild Alzheimer type dementia. Separate factor analyses also showed the two equivalent forms to diverge somewhat in their structural pattern with form 1 demonstrating clear clusterings of the pairs along a continuum ranging from very easy (overlearned) and mediate (superordinate) to hard associates.

Journal Article↗

PubMed1986

Paired associate learning: normative data for differences between high and low associate word pairs.

Wilson, Bacon, Kaszniak, and Fox (1982) suggest that the learning of low associate pairs on the Wechsler Memory Scale involves episodic memory alone while the learning of high associate pairs involves semantic memory as well. Tulving (1983) also comments that, whereas some information in episodic memory is relatively unorganized and access to its content tends to be deliberate and requiring conscious effort (e.g., low associate pairs), information in semantic memory is organized and access to its content is more automatic (e.g., high associate pairs). As there may be occasions when it would be useful to compare these two types of memory functioning, differential diagnosis between depressive pseudodementia and organic dementia for example, normative data is provided enabling the calculation of the frequency with which differences between the learning of the two kinds of associate occur, based on the performance of 500 subjects with no known neuropsychiatric involvement.

Adult↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Primary or depressive dementia: mental status screening.

In the course of interviewing a patient, several aspects of everyday functioning must be covered to provide a range of observations necessary to suggest a provisional diagnosis. First organized by Adolf Meyer, the mental status examination consists of several techniques which, in recent times, have been shortened, structured and standardized to cover maximal ground in minimal time. In this article, the most popular scales are reviewed psychometrically for their capacity to detect, as first-stage instruments, cognitive impairment suggestive of primary dementia in the context of varying prevalence rates and confounding factors like sensory impairments, sociodemographics and depressive states. Several of the measures are found adequate in some respects though not in others, but all of the better ones, when used as front line implements during clinical intake, regularly improve detection over base rates. An analytical method modelled on ROC procedures is then described contrasting two of them before newer instruments are considered which aim to improve sensitivity at relatively little cost to specificity.

Depressive Disorder↗