1. Differential linguistic features of verbal fluency in behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia and primary progressive aphasia.
- Author
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van den Berg, E, Dijkzeul, J, Poos, J, Eikelboom, W, van Hemmen, J, Franzen, S, de Jong, F, Dopper, E, Papma, J, Satoer, D, Jiskoot, L, Seelaar, H, and Vonk, Jet
- Subjects
Aphasia ,assessment ,cognitive ,language ,neurodegenerative - Abstract
Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) is an early-onset neurodegenerative disorder with a heterogeneous clinical presentation. Verbal fluency is regularly used as a sensitive measure of language ability, semantic memory, and executive functioning, but qualitative changes in verbal fluency in FTD are currently overlooked. This retrospective study examined qualitative, linguistic features of verbal fluency in 137 patients with behavioral variant (bv)FTD (n = 50), or primary progressive aphasia (PPA) [25 non-fluent variant (nfvPPA), 27 semantic variant (svPPA), and 34 logopenic variant (lvPPA)] and 25 control participants. Between-group differences in clustering, switching, lexical frequency (LF), age of acquisition (AoA), neighborhood density (ND), and word length (WL) were examined in the category and letter fluency with analysis of variance adjusted for age, sex, and the total number of words. Associations with other cognitive functions were explored with linear regression analysis. The results showed that the verbal fluency performance of patients with svPPA could be distinguished from controls and other patient groups by fewer and smaller clusters, more switches, higher LF, and lower AoA (all p
- Published
- 2022