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Verbal Learning and Memory in Elderly Depressives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2018

Antonia Whitehead
Antonia Whitehead*
Affiliation:
University Department of Psychiatry, Warneford Hospital, Oxford, OX3 7JX
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Extract

Tasks involving verbal learning and memory are widely used in the differential diagnosis of depressive and dementing conditions. That dements suffer widespread impairments of these functions is self-evident, yet depressives also evince some degree of deficit. For elderly patients suffering from affective illnesses Bolton, Savage and Roth (1967) found 29 per cent to gain organic scores on the Modified New Word Learning Test; of elderly depressives, 16 per cent gained scores in the organic range on the Synonym Learning Test (Kendrick, Parboo-singh and Post, 1965), and this figure increased to over three-quarters when a group was selected to contain a large proportion of patients clinically judged as suffering from ‘pseudo-dementia’ (Kendrick, 1967).

Type
Papers
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 123 , Issue 573 , August 1973 , pp. 203 - 208
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1973

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Footnotes

A synopsis of this paper was published in the January 1973 Journal.

References

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