Browsing by Author "Pihlajapiha, Sanna-Mari"

Objective. Difficulties in naming are common already in the very early stages of Alzheimer's Disease, and the difficulties increase as the disease progresses. There are few studies of naming errors in confrontation naming tests by Finnish persons with Alzheimer's disease to date. The purpose of this study was to examine the naming errors and correction attempts produced in the Boston Naming Test (BNT) by Finnish speaking persons with mild and moderate Alzheimer's disease, and how those naming errors and correction attempts change both quantitatively and qualitatively as the disease progresses. Methods. Participants in this study were Finnish speaking persons with mild (n=20) and moderate (n=20) Alzheimer's disease, and healthy age-matched controls (n=30). Participants were given the Boston Naming Test in 1994–1997. Patients with probable Alzheimer's disease came from the Memory Research Unit of the Department of Neurology, Helsinki University Hospital. Control subjects were volunteers from the Helsinki Aging Brain Study which started in 1989, and the controls were chosen from various age groups (55, 60, 65, 70, 75, and 80 years) by random sampling. All the participants underwent complete neurological and neuropsychological examinations. Naming errors and correction attempts produced in the BNT were classified, and the scores were analyzed with the non-parametric Kruskal-Wallis one-way analysis of variance, as well as with chi-square test and Mann-Whitney U test for post hoc pairwise comparisons between groups. Results and conclusions. Compared to healthy age-matched controls, patients with Alzheimer's disease made more naming errors and naming attempts, the number of which increased distinctly as the severity of the disease progressed. Several kinds of semantic naming errors were the most common errors in all three study groups. Patients with Alzheimer's disease gave a particularly large number of descriptions of the target word, as well as unrelated answers. The results show that naming errors change both quantitatively and qualitatively in the course of Alzheimer's disease, and the changes continue as the disease progresses. These results are congruent with earlier studies. A new observation in this study was that during confrontation naming the quantity of empty speech which was included in the correction attempts was almost twice as high in the group with mild Alzheimer's disease compared to healthy controls. Future research is needed to detect at which point of the trajectory of Alzheimer's disease the aforementioned changes are observable.