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Alzheimer’s disease, but not ageing or depression, affects dual-tasking

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An Erratum to this article was published on 13 November 2009

Abstract

Two experiments are reported that assess dual task performance in Alzheimer’s disease (AD), in chronic depression and in healthy old age. Results suggest that dual task impairments are present in AD but are not shown in depression. This is true even when episodic memory performance is equated between the groups. These results, together with those of previous studies, point to dual task performance as an aid to diagnosis of AD relative to depression. This is of particular relevance when episodic memory tests cannot distinguish between the two conditions. The dual task paradigm appears to have considerable promise in assisting the early detection of the specific cognitive deficits associated with AD, and in monitoring their progression, both in the laboratory setting and in everyday tasks. Results also are of theoretical interest in pointing to a specific dual task coordination function in the healthy human cognitive system that allows for the coordination of two tasks performed simultaneously and which is damaged in AD but not in depression.

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Notes

  1. A recent paper by Lonie et al. (2008) used our own dual task procedures in studying patients with a range of depressive symptoms, MCI patients and AD patients as well as healthy older volunteers. However tracking task performance was less than half that for all other studies, and they obtained ceiling effects on single task digit recall for the tests in all groups making it very difficult to interpret the data.

  2. In cases in which the Levene test for equivalence of variances of the clinical groups of Experiment 2 was significant, adjusted (“adj.”) and rounded degrees of freedom for the corresponding T tests are reported.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Psychology, Department of Human Sciences, University of Osnabrück, Seminarstr. 20, 49074, Osnabrück, Germany

    Reiner Kaschel & Miguel Kazén

  2. Department of Psychology, Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology, Human Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, EH8 9JZ, UK

    Robert H. Logie & Sergio Della Sala

Authors
  1. Reiner Kaschel
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  2. Robert H. Logie
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  3. Miguel Kazén
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  4. Sergio Della Sala
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Correspondence to Sergio Della Sala.

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An erratum to this article can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00415-009-5375-0

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Kaschel, R., Logie, R.H., Kazén, M. et al. Alzheimer’s disease, but not ageing or depression, affects dual-tasking. J Neurol 256, 1860–1868 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00415-009-5210-7

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