Utilização de medidas de memória visuoespacial na diferenciação de comprometimentos cognitivos leves vascular e degenerativo

Abstract

The proportion of elderly population is expanding rapidly around the world. Given the increased risk of neurodegenerative disorders development in this portion of society, studies focused on this age group are becoming increasingly relevant. In the continuum of dementia pathologies there is a prodromic phase called mild cognitive impairment (MCI) which has been widely studied since the 1990s. In the same way that dementia disorders can have several origins (degenerative, vascular, psychiatric, traumatic), the same occurs in MCI’s. Distinctions of MCI’s were made based on the affected cognitive domains, however it is important to facilitate the categorization of the impairment by etiology, in order to formulate an accurate prognosis for such conditions. Considering that the two most frequent causes of MCI are degenerative and vascular, and that despite the suggestion that there would be greater impairment of visuospatial memory associated with vascular patients, the literature is inconclusive, a study is proposed comparing patients with vascular (N = 13), degenerative (N = 7) MCI and a control group (N = 23) for the observation and comparison of performance in a task of visuospatial memory with sequential presentation (RULIT) and a simultaneous presentation (La Ruche) to understand the patterns of impairment. We found that both groups presented deficits when compared to the GC, but different patterns were revealed, since different from the literature, the vascular group brought better results in the sequential task than the degenerative, while showing worse results in the simultaneous task. Recognition was also better on the vascular group. This shows the relevance of using different visuospatial memory tasks, opposing the fact that it’s usually used only one, construction-based, test in the neuropsychologic assessment context.