Discourse abilities in patients with dementia of the Alzheimer type-with reference to communication problems in their everyday life

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The aims of this study were to develop measures to assess discourse of people with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and to investigate its relation to communication in everyday situations. For these purposes, we newly invented a set of discourse rating scales through our qualitative analysis of discourse of 9 patients with Alzheimer' s disease.With these scales, the discourse performance of people with mild AD, people with mild aphasia and healthy controls was assessed and compared. The results revealed a number of the discourse characteristics of people with AD, which were not found in discourse of people with aphasia nor healthy controls.We also tried to investigate the discourse change in AD at different stages of disease, and some relation between the results of the discourse measures and severity of the disease was suggested. However, the conclusion should be reserved because of the scarcity of severely impaired patients' data.As for the difficulties of communication in everyday situations, we interviewed family key persons who were taking care of AD patients. While many of the family members of AD patients reported that they found repetition of the same talks and questions, forgetfulness, reduced ability of comprehension, inability to cope with problems, etc., few family members found problems of language.We also investigated the relation between these problems observed by family members and the results of the discourse measures. Some of the discourse characteristics, such as language impairments, were common, but there were also characteristics that disagreed. In order to understand the communication problems of people with AD, we need information from family members as well as assessment of discourse in clinical settings.