Executive deficits in elderly patients with major unipolar depression.

Several studies have evaluated executive function in depressed patients, and the results vary from significant impairment relative to controls to virtually intact performances. To better comprehend executive impairment in elderly patients with major unipolar depression, the performance of 21 elderly depressed patients was compared with that of 19 elderly normal controls on executive tasks. The relationships between memory deficits and depression severity and between memory deficits and executive dysfunction were also examined.

Absence of amusia and preserved naming of musical instruments in an aphasic composer.

M.M., a right-handed, 74 year old professional musician and composer, presented with a progressive aphasia with a severe anomia.

Discrimination of facial identity and of emotions in Alzheimer's disease.

Objective: To investigate processing of human faces identity and of emotional expressions in patients with Alzheimer's Disease (AD).

Background: Mechanisms responsible for discriminating facial identity may be dissociated from those involved in discriminating facial expressions. Patients with prosopagnosia often have preserved capacities for processing emotional facial expressions and occasionally, patients with focal lesions may recognize human faces without being able to recognize their facial expression.

Language impairment and rate of cognitive decline in Alzheimer's disease.

There is growing evidence that AD consists of different subtypes, and that language is a pertinent factor to identify a subgroup with a fast rate of cognitive decline. We report the first results of a longitudinal study in which we compared two groups of patients with probable AD. The main result showed that a subgroup with stable MMSE scores during a 1-year follow-up period had an impairment in language domains which are usually preserved until an advanced stage of the disease.

Loss of topographic memory with learning deficits.

A case is reported in which a patient with a vascular accident involving the posterior portion of the minor hemisphere presented a topographic memory loss and also deficits in his ability to learn certain types of new material. The study of this case has led us to re-examine spatial functioning in light of both human and animal research. Based on clinical and experimental evidence we have proposed that a unitary interpretation can account for the various spatial deficits associated with posterior righ hemisphere lesions.