Deterioration of visual-perceptual organization ability in Alzheimer's disease.

Although deterioration of higher-order visual information processing abilities occurs in Alzheimer's disease (AD), few cross-sectional or longitudinal studies have systematically examined this deficit. The performance of 135 patients with probable AD and 97 matched normal control (NC) participants were compared on a structured test of perceptual organization ability, the Hooper Visual Organization Test (VOT). Both the standard VOT score and a derived score that corrected for anomia were significantly lower for AD patients than for NC participants, but neither score was particularly effective at distinguishing between the groups.

The clock drawing test as a measure of executive dysfunction in elderly depressed patients.

The aims of this research were to determine whether performance on the Clock Drawing Test (CDT) could accurately distinguish between older patients with depression and older patients with depression and previously undocumented executive dysfunction and to determine if there was a correlation between CDT and depression severity. The authors studied 52 patients consecutively admitted to a geriatric psychiatry inpatient unit of a university hospital who met DSM-IV criteria for major depression or depression not otherwise specified but had no concurrent diagnosis of dementia. All the subjects completed the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), Mattis Dementia Rating Scale (DRS), and the CDT, as well as the Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS).