[Semantic dementia: reflexions of a French working group for diagnostic criteria and constitution of a patient cohort].

Semantic dementia (SD) is a syndrome of progressive loss of semantic knowledge for objects and people. International criteria propose that SD be included in the frontotemporal lobar degeneration syndromes, with progressive non-fluent aphasia and frontotemporal dementia (FTD). However, several related syndromes have been defined that clinically and conceptually share both similarities and differences with SD: fluent progressive aphasia, progressive prosopagnosia, temporal variant of FTD.

The multiple-choice formats (forms F and G) of the Benton Visual Retention Test as a tool to detect age-related memory changes in population-based studies and clinical settings.

The Benton Visual Retention Test (BVRT) is a widely used test for the evaluation of visuospatial memory. Alternate forms and various types of administration are available. Whereas most of the formats are visuoconstructional tasks, the forms F and G involve visual recognition.

Cube drawing performances in normal ageing and Alzheimer's disease: data from the PAQUID elderly population-based cohort.

To assess the influence of age and other sociodemographical variables, depressive symptomatology and the occurrence of Alzheimer's disease (AD) on cube drawing, we examined the performance of 858 normal subjects and 17 incident AD patients in the PAQUID population-based study. Cube drawing was first performed on verbal command and, in case of failure, a model of a cube was given to the subjects to copy. Normal subjects had some difficulties in drawing a cube on verbal command, evidenced by 40% failure in the drawing-to-command condition, while only 17% still failed in the drawing-to-copy condition.