The Application of Language Tasks to the Identification of Senile Dementia

Abstract

A battery of 6 language and cognitive tasks and a Neurobehavioral Inventory were field tested on a sample of 45 patients attending or resident in a hospital for geriatrics. The study was devised in order to determine whether dementia could be differentiated from normal aging, from cerebral insult, and from other degenerative neurological diseases, on the basis of performance on the tasks. A discriminant analysis found the tasks most effective in distinguishing groups to be Pantomime Expression, Immediate — and Recent — Story-recall, the Neurobehavioral Inventory, and the Mental Status Questionnaire. Sixty percent of subjects diagnosed with senile dementia were correctly identified by their performance on these tasks. The three tests which failed to mark significant differences between groups were Block Design, Verbal Description and Generative Naming.