Response inhibition in patients with mild cognitive impairment and mild dementia of Alzheimer’s type

<p>Pooja Rai, Indramani L Singh, Tara Singh, Trayambak Tiwari and Deepika Joshi</p>

Response inhibition in patients with mild cognitive impairment and mild dementia of Alzheimer’s type

Pooja Rai, Indramani L Singh, Tara Singh, Trayambak Tiwari and Deepika Joshi

Banaras Hindu University, India

: Int J Ment Health Psychiatry

Abstract

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a stage between normal ageing and dementia. The patients with MCI are at higher risk of developing Alzheimer and other dementia. The subtypes i.e. amnestic and nonamnestic predict the conversion of MCI to dementia in later course of illness. The amnestic MCI is the memory related impairment which progresses to DAT, whereas non-amnestic MCI is non-memory impairment viz. executive dysfunction, visuospatial abilities, language etc., progresses to non-Alzheimer’s dementia like lewy body dementia, frontotemporal dementia. However, studies in past showed contradictory findings in which few study revealed impairment in inhibitory control processes at early stage of DAT, whereas some studies didn’t show inhibitory impairment at early stage. Thus, the present study was an attempt to assess the differences in processing inhibitory control processes in MCI and mild DAT patients using flanker compatibility paradigm of attention network test. The inhibitory control was measured by analyzing the differences between the performance on congruent and incongruent stimuli. Result showed that MCI patients do not commit much error in congruent condition than mild DAT patients and the processing speed was also not found significantly different. However, in incongruent condition mild DAT group significantly committed more error in comparison to MCI group. Further, MCI group performed significantly faster than mild DAT group in response processing. Thus, the present study revealed impairment in inhibitory control function in both MCI and mild DAT which caused difficulty in resolving conflict among responses.