Evaluation of neuropsychological profile and behavioral changes in alzheimer dementia, subcortical vascular dementia, behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia, parkinson's disease dementia

Introduction and Objective : Dementia is a progressive degenerative process that will increase its incidence in the future due to the increases in expected life duration. With this increase, it becomes more important to reveal the Behavioral and Psychological Symptoms of Dementia (BPSD), which will affect the burden of the patient and caregiver, and which can respond better to treatment than cognitive symptoms. The frequency and severity of BPSDs vary according to the type and stage of dementia. In this study, cognitive and behavioral differences between Alzheimer Dementia (AD), Subcortical Vascular Dementia (sVaD), Behavioral Variant Frontotemporal Dementia (bvFTD), Parkinson's Disease Dementia (PDD) were analyzed. Material and Method : In this study, 20 AD, 20 sVaD, 16 bvFTD and 14 PHD patients in the CDR 1-2 stage were evaluated in Ege University Faculty of Medicine Department of Neurology, Polyclinic and Clinical Neuropsychology Laboratory. Standardized Mini Mental Test (SMMT), detailed neuropsychological test battery, Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS), and Neuropsychiatric Inventory (NPI) were applied to the patients. Findings : Among the neuropsychological tests examined, it was found that the sVaD group had a lower score than the other dementia groups in the Clock Drawing Test. There was no significant difference in other neuropsychological tests. There was a statistically significant difference between the disease groups in the evaluation of hallucination, euphoria/elationn, and sleep/night behavior among the subgroups of the NPE scale. The differences in these test scores were between PDD and sVaD (more in the sVaD group), between PDD and bvFTD (more in the bvFTD), between sVaD and bvFTD (more in the sVaD), respectively. Conclusion : This study is one of the studies evaluating the behavioral differences of multiple dementia groups. Some symptoms were found as more common in the survey than in the literature. One of the essential probable reasons for this situation is that the analyzed patients are in CDR 1-2 stage. For the early and differential diagnosis of BPSD, prospective studies with a higher number of patients and evaluating homogenous dementia groups are necessary.