Poster Session 06 Program Schedule
02/15/2024
04:00 pm - 05:15 pm
Room: Majestic Complex (Posters 61-120)
Poster Session 06: Aging | MCI | Neurodegenerative Disease - PART 2
Final Abstract #73
Incidental Delayed Recall of a Picture Scene as a Marker of Memory Preservation in Primary Progressive Aphasia: A Multiple Case Study
Molly Mather, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, United States
Maureen Daly, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, United States
Sandra Weintraub, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, United States
Category: Neurodegenerative Disorders
Keyword 1: aphasia
Keyword 2: dementia - other cortical
Keyword 3: neuropsychological assessment
Objective:
Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a dementia syndrome defined by initial focal progressive language deficits without evidence of impairment in other domains. Assessment of memory abilities is difficult in this population due to interference from language disturbance, especially for tests that require auditory verbal encoding and recall. Alternate, and at times creative, approaches are needed to accurately establish memory preservation in PPA. We present an informal method of assessing retentive memory preservation in three PPA cases using incidental delayed recall of the Western Aphasia Battery – Revised picture description.
Participants and Methods:
We present a series of three patients diagnosed with PPA who underwent clinical neuropsychological evaluation at a memory clinic. Cases 1 and 2 (ages 56 and 62) were diagnosed with logopenic variant PPA and both had positive CSF biomarkers for Alzheimer’s disease. Case 3 (age 53) was diagnosed with non-fluent/agrammatic PPA, likely due to FTLD given negative research amyloid PET scan. All cases were right-handed white women with at least 16 years of education. As part of a broader neurocognitive battery, all patients were administered standardized tests of verbal and visual memory (e.g., RBANS, BVMT-R, HVLT-R). The WAB-R was administered to assess language functions, including the ability to tell a story from a drawing of a picnic scene. After a delay of 20-30 minutes, patients were asked to recall details of the picture they had described even though not asked to remember it (i.e., incidental recall).
Results:
Neurocognitive profiles of all three cases were predominantly notable for language difficulties with additional frontal-networks weaknesses. MoCA scores were significantly lower than expectation (range: 16-22/30), largely due to interference from aphasia. In each case, performance on tests of verbal memory was below expectation for age. However, all patients were able to recall all or nearly all details previously described of the picnic scene in the WAB-R after a delay of at least 20 minutes.
Conclusions:
The current multiple case study provides evidence of preserved contextual verbal memory in early stages of PPA as assessed by recall of a previously described picnic scene. This is consistent with evidence of relatively better performance on tasks of memory with visually based encoding (e.g., Three Words Three Shapes) than auditory based encoding for word lists and stories in PPA. Poor performance on standard tests of verbal memory in PPA is not a reliable marker of retentive memory impairment. Recall of a visual picture scene may serve as a useful alternative task to standard auditory story memory tasks to establish preservation of contextual verbal memory.
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