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Cognitive Intervention Essay

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Given the pattern of cortical atrophy beginning in the temporal region in early AD, language or verbal fluency retraining becomes a crucial cognitive domain from rehabilitation perspective (22). Taking this into account, a recent case study (23) investigated the implications of a longitudinal (5 years) cognitive intervention program in a mild Alzheimer's disease (mAD) patient targeting mainly the language functioning. The case was recruited from an outpatient of the 3rd Neurology Clinic of G. Papanikolaou hospital and the Geriatric Unit of the B Internal Medicine of the Hippocration hospital of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, in Greece. He was right handed, native Greek speaker, 78 years old and highly educated (16 years) with no self-reported auditory or visual problems. He could read and recognize the visual items of the tasks and was …show more content…

He had strong willingness to improve himself as he had self-consciousness about his deficits due to the disease and their consequences in everyday life. After the screening assessment he was informed about procedure and the duration of the intervention in order to decide if he wanted to participate. The cognitive intervention had 2 parts: the intensive one included training strategies and tasks that enhanced his impairments (memory, naming, comprehension), and the second one (the next 4 years), without guidelines or teaching. Results showed that there was significant improvement to the RBMT Direct route (60%), categorical verbal fluency, (52%), the Wisconsin (50%), the Comprehension of Oral spelling (BDAE) (42.86%) and the narrative written (BDAE- the cookie theft, 40%). Moreover, on language performance there was significant difference between the 3 neuropsychological assessments too [Fx2(3,8) = 13.83 p = .045] showed the best performance to the PALPA (56, 59 – reading comprehension), the BDAE Reading of phrases and paragraphs and the Narrative

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