ASSESSING ATTENTIONAL DEFICITS IN ALZHEIMER’S PATIENT: A CASE STUDY

Abstract

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is one of the most common neurodegenerative disease and is considered to be the main cause of cognitive impairment in elderly people. Earlier Alzheimer's disease has been viewed as age related memory disorder. Now research related to attention has revealed impaired selective attention which later accompanied by memory deficits in AD. Therefore, attention related cognitive assessment needs to be explored. In the present case study, a 76 years old female with Alzheimer disease began to experience impairment in memory and activities of daily living. The cognitive domains were examined using MMSE and MoCA, which showed that the patient had impaired performance in domains related to attention, orientation to time and memory. The attentional system was measured by Attention Network Task – Revised (ANT-R) comprises of three attentional networks that are alerting which prepares for fast response by maintaining an alert state, orienting network which selectively allocates attention to a relevant area of the visual field and executive control which involves planning, making decision, detecting errors and dealing conflict. The attentional network scores were calculated and patient score on alerting network was found to be lowest in comparison to orienting and executive control network. Overall result showed that the executive control network is inhibited by the alerting network, whereas the orienting network improves the efficiency of the executive control network.