The verbal fluency performances of people wıth frontotemporal lobar degeneratıon

By improving standard of life and extending of lifespan the prevelance of dementia has increased. Frontotemporal lobar degeneration is a progressive dementia which is second common disease after Alzheimer Disease (AD) and affects people in early ages. In the early stages of dementia word-finding difficulties, even names of familiar persons, is basic symptom for language deficit. Verbal fluency tests are extensively used for evaluating language and cognitive functions in dementia. The study group included experimental group and control group. The experimental group consisted 21 individuals who were diagnosed as FTLD in Osmangazi University, Department of Neurology and had 10-26 MMSE scores. Control group consisted of 21 individuals who had not any nuerological or other problems. Ages of experimental group and control group were between 48 and 71. The aim of study is to compare the verbal fluency performances of people with frontotemporal lobar degeneration and normal elderly people. Besides this, the verbal fluency skills of two variants of FTLD, frontotemporal demans (FTD) and semantic demans (SD), were investigated. In this study semantic and phonemic fluency tests were used and 'F-A-S' voices were chosen for phonemic fluency test and 'animal'category were used for the semantic fluency test. Cluster and switching were investigeted for qualitative analysis. As a result of this study, a significant difference has observed in experimental group when compared to the control group in terms of verbal fluency performances. The experimental group could produce less words than the control group. Altough there were no differences between two groups in term of cluster performance, it was observed that the switching skill of experimental group had decreased. When compared FTD and SD groups in term of total words in semantic fluency test, there as no difference between two groups. However in phonemic fluency test FTD group could produce less words than the SD group. Also SD group could switch much more in semantic fluency test than the phonemic fluency test. The switching scores of experimental group were more in the semantic fluency test than in the phonemic fluency test.