Measuring Effort in Logopenic variant Primary Progressive Aphasia

 
   Lead Investigator:    Rachel Pagnotti
   Institution      :    University of Pennsylvania
   E-Mail           :    ButlerPR@pennmedicine.upenn.edu
   Proposal ID      :    1440



   Proposal Description:
   Research suggests that a significant portion of neuropsychologists continue to  use embedded and stand-alone measures of effort and motivation when completing   evaluations of older adults. The most widely used effort measures rely on         language, working memory, and long-term memory abilities, which are commonly     impacted in different dementia etiologies. Previous research suggests that       false positive errors on effort measures significantly increase as cognition     declines however, this research has mainly been completed in patients??? with     Alzheimer???s disease or mixed etiology.                                         This proposed research project will investigate how individuals diagnosed with   logopenic variant Primary Progressive Aphasia (lvPPA) perform on Reliable Digit  Span (RDS), an embedded measure of effort derived from the longest digit         forward and backward. Due to impairment in language and working memory, it is     hypothesized that individuals with lvPPA will perform significantly worse on     RDS than healthy controls, even with more lenient cut-off scores. More accurate  measures of effort in individuals with lvPPA will also be explored. This         proposed project???s objective includes challenging the existing practice of     using an RDS cut-off score of ???7 in older adults with cognitive impairment.