TY - JOUR
T1 - Executive dysfunction and memory in older patients with major and minor depression (DOI:10.1016/j.acn.2006.05.011)
AU - Elderkin-Thompson, Virginia
AU - Mintz, Jim
AU - Haroon, Ebrahim
AU - Lavretsky, Helen
AU - Kumar, Anand
N1 - Funding Information:
This research supported by the National Institute of Mental Health through RO1 MH61567 (Anand Kumar, M.D.), KO2 MH02043 (Anand Kumar, M.D.), K23 MH 01948 (Helen Lavretsky, M.D.) and MO1 RR00865 (General Clinical Research Center at UCLA).
PY - 2007/2
Y1 - 2007/2
N2 - Executive function, known to be impaired during late-life depression, is dependent on frontostriatal pathways. Memory is also frequently observed to be impaired among late-life depressed patients, so we assessed the possibility that executive function mediates the learning and recall deficit as a "downstream" effect of the frontostriatal compromise in executive function. A cross-sectional sample of minor and major depressed patients (N = 95) and nondepressed volunteers (N = 71), screened for other Axis I disorders, dementia, medical comorbidity and severity of depression, completed a neuropsychological battery that included the California Verbal Learning Test (CVLT) and other tests selected for convergent and divergent validity testing. Depressed patients differed from controls on learning the word list and on related and unrelated executive tasks. Executive function was a mediator for depressed patients verbal learning scores (z = -2.67, p = .01). A nonverbal executive score also mediated verbal learning (z = -2.18, p = .03) indicating convergent validity of executive dysfunction during verbal learning exercises. In conclusion, the verbal memory deficits typically attributed to late-life depression may result from impaired executive functioning during the learning phase of the recall task.
AB - Executive function, known to be impaired during late-life depression, is dependent on frontostriatal pathways. Memory is also frequently observed to be impaired among late-life depressed patients, so we assessed the possibility that executive function mediates the learning and recall deficit as a "downstream" effect of the frontostriatal compromise in executive function. A cross-sectional sample of minor and major depressed patients (N = 95) and nondepressed volunteers (N = 71), screened for other Axis I disorders, dementia, medical comorbidity and severity of depression, completed a neuropsychological battery that included the California Verbal Learning Test (CVLT) and other tests selected for convergent and divergent validity testing. Depressed patients differed from controls on learning the word list and on related and unrelated executive tasks. Executive function was a mediator for depressed patients verbal learning scores (z = -2.67, p = .01). A nonverbal executive score also mediated verbal learning (z = -2.18, p = .03) indicating convergent validity of executive dysfunction during verbal learning exercises. In conclusion, the verbal memory deficits typically attributed to late-life depression may result from impaired executive functioning during the learning phase of the recall task.
KW - Cognition
KW - Depression
KW - Elderly
KW - Executive function
KW - Learning
KW - Memory
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U2 - 10.1016/j.acn.2007.01.021
DO - 10.1016/j.acn.2007.01.021
M3 - Comment/debate
C2 - 17443924
AN - SCOPUS:33847666426
VL - 22
SP - 261
EP - 270
JO - Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology
JF - Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology
SN - 0887-6177
IS - 2
ER -