Neuropsychological and Syntactic Deficits in HIV Seropositive Males

Maria Kambanaros,Grigorios Nasios,Lydia Leonidou,Lambros Messinis,Mina Psichogiou,Panagiotis Papathanasopoulos,Charalambos A Gogos

doi:10.2174/1874205x01913010107

Abstract

Objective: Given the underlying frontal-basal ganglia circuit neuropathogenesis of HIV-infected individuals, it is surprising that little is reported about potential language deficits as part of their higher cognitive dysfunctional profile. This study aims to elucidate whether HIV-positive individuals have linguistic impairments that may originate from or be intensified by deficits in cognitive functions. The research questions address (i) quantitative differences in sentence repetition abilities involving complex syntactic phenomena between adults with HIV and non-HIV healthy controls (ii) correlations of sentence repetition scores with neurocognitive measures and (iii) correlation of sentence repetition performance with duration and severity of HIV. Methods: A battery of neuropsychological tests were administered to 40 HIV - seropositive males and 40 demographically matched healthy controls to assess verbal learning/episodic memory, psychomotor speed, executive functions and visuospatial abilities. Language abilities were evaluated using a repetition task that screened specific complex syntactic operations at the sentence-level. Results: A significant difference was noted between the two groups regarding correct repetition of the sentence repetition task with the control group outperforming the HIV-seropositive group. For the HIV group, significant correlations were found for correct sentence repetition with years of education, duration of illness, Mini-Mental State Examination, semantic and phonemic fluency, symbol digit modality test scores, and the Trail Making Test (parts A and B). Conclusion: Speech-language pathologists and neuropsychologists should screen for language deficits associated with the different clinical syndromes in HIV patients as part of their routine clinical care.

Highlights

Around 40 million people are infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) [1]
To address the research questions, the performance of the HIV-positive and healthy adult control groups was analysed for neurocognitive performance based on neuropsychological testing and for complex language abilities using a sentence repetition measure
The current study investigated the relationship between neurocognitive performance and complex language abilities in a group of HIV-positive males on HAART, and whether performance across domains was associated with HIV infection-related factors and/or age and educational levels

Summary

Introduction

Around 40 million people are infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) [1]. HIV-positive individuals have syntactic language impairments that may originate from or be intensified by deficits in neurocognitive functions as related to the severity of the disease [5]. One way to describe the link between cognitive domains and language abilities after HIV onset is to examine the statistical associations between individuals’ performance on neurocognitive and language assessment measures and compare this to non-infected healthy age and educationmatched controls. Syntactic language abilities were screened using an offline repetition task involving complex structural operations at the sentence-level. Given that the HIV infection targets the central nervous system in frontal and subcortical areas [9 - 13], the present study used a quick measure of syntactic ability [14] to analyze complex language structures for Greek

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion