Amnesia Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Amnesia, including details on memory loss, causes, treatment, brain injury,.

Retrograde amnesia for semantic information in Alzheimer's disease.

Meeter M, Kollen A, Scheltens P

Department of Cognitive Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, NL 1081 BT Amsterdam, The Netherlands. m@meeter.nl

Patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease and normal controls were tested on a retrograde amnesia test with semantic content (Neologism and Vocabulary Test, or NVT), consisting of neologisms to be defined. Patients showed a decrement as compared to normal controls, pointing to retrograde amnesia within semantic memory. No evidence for a gradient within this amnesia was found, although one was present on an autobiographic test of retrograde amnesia that had a wider time scale. Several explanations for these results are presented, including one that suggests that extended retrograde amnesia and semantic memory deficits are in fact one and the same deficit.

Published 2 February 2005 in J Int Neuropsychol Soc, 11(1): 40-8.
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