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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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| Executive functioning in older adults with hoarding disorder | | Author(s) | Catherine R Ayers, Julie Loebach Wetherell, Dawn Schiehser |
| Journal title | International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, vol 28, no 11, November 2013 |
| Publisher | Wiley Blackwell, November 2013 |
| Pages | pp 1175-1181 |
| Source | www.orangejournal.org |
| Keywords | Hoarding ; Cognitive processes ; Mental ageing ; Mental speed ; Cognitive impairment ; Evaluation. |
| Annotation | Hoarding disorder (HD) is a chronic and debilitating psychiatric condition. Midlife HD patients have been found to have neurocognitive impairment, particularly in areas of executive functioning, but the extent to which this is due to comorbid psychiatric disorders has not been clear. The purpose of the present investigation was to examine executive functioning in geriatric HD patients without any comorbid Axis I disorders compared with a healthy older adult comparison group. It was hypothesised that older adults with HD would perform significantly worse on measures of executive functioning in a range of intelligence tests. Study results confirmed that older adults with HD showed significant differences from healthy older controls in multiple aspects of executive functioning. Compared with healthy controls, older adults with HD committed significantly more total, non-perseverative errors and conceptual level responses on the Wisconsin Card Sort Task and had significantly worse performance on the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-IV digit span and letter-number sequencing tests. Hoarding symptom severity was strongly correlated with executive dysfunction in the HD group. The study concludes that compared with demographically-matched controls, older adults with HD have dysfunction in several domains of executive functioning including mental control, working memory, inhibition and set shifting. Executive dysfunction is strongly correlated with hoarding severity and is not because of comorbid psychiatric disorders in HD patients. These results have broad clinical implications suggesting that executive functioning should be assessed and taken into consideration when developing intervention strategies for older adults with HD. (JL). |
| Accession Number | CPA-131018205 A |
| Classmark | EPH: DA: D6: DG: E4: 4C |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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