Chest
Clinical Investigations: COPDVerbal Memory Impairment in COPD: Its Mechanisms and Clinical Relevance
Section snippets
Subjects
The verbal memory performance of patients with stabilized hypoxic and hypercapnic COPD (group A or study group) was compared with that of normal subjects of the same age (group B), Alzheimer patients (group C), and older normal subjects (group D). The previous demonstration of a peculiar verbal memory profile in the very old and of some analogies between the respective effects of aging and COPD on the cognitive functions was the rationale for including group D in the analysis.2, 4, 6
Subjects of
Results
The general characteristics of the four groups are reported in Table 2. Female subjects prevailed in groups C and D, whereas educational level and level of employment before retirement were uniform across groups, according to criteria of selection. The global cognitive performance of group A, as assessed by the MDB, was better than in Alzheimer patients, but significantly inferior to that of the remaining two groups. Table 3 reports results of verbal memory tests. The study group had
Discussion
Results from the present study disclose a great interindividual variability in verbal memory pattern of COPD patients. A group-specific verbal memory profile was found in a minority of them, while variant profiles were very common. Only a fifth of COPD patients could be considered to have normal verbal memory, that is a verbal memory pattern conforming to that of same-age normal subjects. The high proportion of COPD patients classified as belonging to the older normal group supports the
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
We wish to thank Sabina Magalini, MD, for her careful revision of this article.
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