Abstract
Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) affects individuals of all ages, causing physical and cognitive impairment, thus reducing their quality of life. The evaluation of the cognitive capacity of patients with GAD is an important tool when trying to understand the damages that this disorder brings to the individual. Therefore, the present study aimed to understand if there are losses or alterations in cognitive functions, mainly executive ones of these individuals. Twenty-one subjects, both men and women, underwent a 2-back test to assess working memory performance and a Stroop Task to assess inhibitory control, comprising a TAG Group (n = 11) and a Control Group (n = 10). The patients were selected from ambulatory care at a tertiary hospital in the Western São Paulo. The results showed important differences in the performance of patients with GAD, who exhibited equivalent reaction time (RT) performance in the 2-back test, but with a greater number of errors. At the Stroop task they are consistently slower than the Control Group, for the equivalent number of errors. Taken together, these data point to significant prejudice in GAD, even within a limited sample of subjects.
Highlights
Anxiety is considered a normal state of the mind when people are exposed to a situation of apprehension or fear provoked by the anticipation of unpleasant and dangerous outcomes
We posed a simple question: could the functional changes imposed by the anxiety syndrome impair working memory efficiency and inhibitory control? We addressed this by evaluating the performance of patients with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) in the 2-back test, important in the manipulation of data in working memory and tested the inhibitory control of the patients through the Stroop task
We excluded: (1) one subject from the Anxiety Group and two controls because they gave up the tests, (2) a patient who had a primary diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and not GAD, and (3) four control subjects who responded incorrectly to the tests
Summary
Anxiety is considered a normal state of the mind when people are exposed to a situation of apprehension or fear provoked by the anticipation of unpleasant and dangerous outcomes. Dias (2014) argues that EFs are a set of high order cognitive abilities that perform the coordination of adaptive responses to new or complex situations. Such skills include inhibiting irrelevant elements, selecting, integrating, and manipulating relevant information, the intention and execution of an action, cognitive and behavioral flexibility, and attitude self-monitoring (Chan et al, 2008). The authors defend that knowing the essential subcomponents and concepts of EFs is important for evaluating the best methodology of assessment of the prefrontal function
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