Abstract
Several studies have shown that people with Alzheimer's disease (AD) demonstrate difficulties in doing two things at once or 'dual-tasking' and that this dual task impairment is insensitive to normal ageing, chronic depression or prodromal conditions like Mild Cognitive Impairment. It is not known, however, if this impairment is specific to AD, or also present in other dementias, such as vascular dementia (VaD). In this study 15 people with VaD, 25 healthy age-matched and 25 healthy young controls were assessed using a paper and pencil dual tasking paradigm and several measures of working and episodic memory. Age had no effect on dual task performance, but the VaD patients demonstrated a significant impairment in dual tasking ability. Performance on the memory measures was instead affected by age with a further deterioration in the VaD patients. Both dual tasking and memory ability were significantly correlated with disease severity, as assessed by the MMSE. These results indicate that performance on the dual task could be a specific indicator of pathological ageing.
Highlights
Dual tasking is the ability to perform two activities concurrently
Several studies have reported that dual task performance is affected by normal ageing [14], and a number of neurological conditions, including Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) [26]
When the two tasks are individually adjusted to equate single task performance across groups, dual task performance is not affected by normal ageing [6,8,16, 20,34,35], non-converting MCI [12,30] or chronic depression [18]
Summary
Dual tasking is the ability to perform two activities concurrently. The ability to dual task is thought to reflect the capacity to coordinate the concurrent activity of two independent cognitive systems [5,6,19]. Graham et al [13] compared 19 people with VaD, 19 people with AD and 19 healthy participants on a range of measures of cognitive functioning, including dual tasking They found that the VaD patients performed significantly more poorly than healthy controls and the AD patients on the assessment of dual tasking ability. In the study reported here, we used a newer version of the dual task paradigm, which has been found to have good test-retest reliability in both younger (0.83) and older adults (0.90) based on normative data from 128 healthy participants aged 17–75 years [16] This aim of this study is to explore how people with VaD perform on a dual task assessment, when compared with healthy age-matched controls. The experimental hypotheses were that the people with VaD will demonstrate (1) dual task impairment and (2) difficulties on the working and episodic memory assessments, when compared with healthy age-matched controls
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