Table 2.
Mean (±SD) cognitive findings
| Amyotrophic lateral sclerosisa | Parkinson’s diseasea | Healthy seniors | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Language | |||
| Boston naming test (max = 30) | 27.16 ± 2.34*,+,@ | 26.77 ± 3.48* | 29.80 ± 0.44 |
| Executive functioning | |||
| Letter fluency (# words/min) | 36.71 ± 14.10*,+,@ | 38.62 ± 19.48+,@ | 52.40 ± 11.54 |
| Category fluency (# words/min) | 18.45 ± 6.40+,@ | 15.90 ± 7.20*,+,@ | 24.80 ± 4.60 |
| Grammatical comprehension (max = 72) | 70.5 ± 1.81+,@ | 67.76 ± 5.44^ | 71.33 ± 0.57 |
| Pyramids and palm trees test (max = 104) | 99.71 ± 3.70+,@ | 97.68 ± 7.25+,@ | 104 |
| Associativity judgment task | |||
| Verb judgments—action | 91.7 ± 8.0^ | 93.0 ± 7.4 | 95.6 ± 4.2 |
| Verb judgments—cognition | 90.3 ± 9.8 | 89.4 ± 9.2 | 90.6 ± 7.6 |
| Noun judgments—object | 92.6 ± 5.2 | 90.7 ± 7.5 | 92.6 ± 6.6 |
| Noun judgments—abstract | 90.8 ± 8.0 | 88.9 ± 8.5 | 93.1 ± 6.8 |
According to paired t-tests,
differs from healthy seniors p < 0.01;
differs from healthy seniors p < 0.05. ALS and PD did not differ in their performance on neuropsychological measures Following Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons,
correlates with action word associativity judgments p <0.05;
correlates with associativity judgments for other word classes p < 0.05
Neuropsychological measures obtained within 1 month of the associativity judgment task include: Letter fluency: the number of unique words beginning with a target letter listed in 1 min, administered for three different letters (F, A and S); category fluency: the number of different animals named in 1 min; Boston Naming Test: assessment of confrontation naming evaluating the number of correctly named line drawings of objects using a 30-item version; Pyramids and Palm Trees test: assessment of semantic memory evaluating the number of correct items in a two-alternative forced-choice associativity judgment task for identical word or picture representations of objects; grammatical comprehension: a two-alternative forced-choice sentence-picture matching task, where subjects matched a sentence featuring cleft and center-embedded phrase structures in subject-relative or object-relative voice to one of two pictures