LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION PROFILES IN ALZHEIMERS-DISEASE MULTIINFARCT DEMENTIA, AND FRONTOTEMPORAL DEGENERATION

We assessed language functioning in 116 age-, education-, and severity -matched patients with the clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease ( AD), multi-infarct dementia (MID) due to small-vessel ischemic disease , or a frontotemporal form of degeneration (FD). Assessments of compre hension revealed that patients with AD are significantly impaired in t heir judgments of single word and picture meaning, whereas patients wi th FD had sentence comprehension difficulty due to impaired processing of grammatical phrase structure. Patients with MID did not differ fro m control subjects in their comprehension performance. Traditional aph asiologic measures did not distinguish between AD, MID, and FD. Select ive patterns of comprehension difficulty in patients with different fo rms of dementia emphasize that language deficits cannot be explained e ntirely by the compromised memory associated with a progressive neurod egenerative illness.