Alzheimer's Disease Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Alzheimer's Disease, including details on diagnosis, memory loss, heredity, treatment, medication.

Abnormal spatial and non-spatial cueing effects in mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease.

Tales A, Snowden RJ, Haworth J, Wilcock G

Department of Care of the Elderly University of Bristol, Clinical Research Centre and Memory Disorders Clinic, The BRACE Centre, Blackberry Hill Hospital, Bristol, UK. Andrea.Tales@north-bristol.swest.nhs.uk

Our aim was to further characterize the clinical concept of mild cognitive impairment (MCI). We examined visual attention-related processing in 12 patients with amnestic MCI, 16 healthy older adults and 16 patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) by measuring performance on computer-based tests of attentional disengagement, alerting ability, and inhibition of return. Unlike the healthy older controls, the patients with AD and the patients with amnestic MCI exhibited a significant detriment in both the ability to disengage attention from an incorrectly cued location and the ability to use a visual cue to produce an alerting effect. The pattern of results displayed by the MCI group indicates that patients who only appear clinically to suffer from a deficit in memory also display a deficit in specific aspects of visual attention-related processing, which closely resemble the magnitude seen in AD.

Published 4 April 2005 in Neurocase, 11(1): 85-92.
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