Behavioral dysexecutive symptoms in normal aging
Introduction
There is a growing consensus that damage to the frontal lobes predominantly affects higher integrated processes such as planning, decision-making or central executive processes devoted to the control and regulation of cognition. Frontal damage also results in behavioral changes suggesting that such executive processes also play an important role in regulating behavior in order to follow plans and programs. This pattern of cognitive and behavioral symptoms is known as the “Dysexecutive syndrome.”
From a variety of sources, there is now abundant evidence that the prefrontal cortex undergoes deterioration as a function of normal aging. Dysfunction of frontal systems was related to many of the age-related cognitive deficits such as working memory deficits or decline in executive functions (e.g. Daigneault & Braun, 1993; Phillips, 1999; West, 1996). However, executive functioning deficits in normal aging may affect behavior as well as cognition. Indeed, deficits in planning, decision-making, organization, self-control, and awareness of problems are very likely to affect daily life functioning of elderly people. For instance, executive functioning was shown to be an important determinant of how elderly people manage with instrumental activities of daily living such as managing money or taking medication (Carlson et al., 1999; Grigsby, Kaye, Baxter, Shetterly, & Hamman, 1998).
Therefore, the study of executive functioning in aging seems to be interesting to extend to the behavioral area. However, although widely studied in “neurological” patients, behavioral dysexecutive symptoms have rarely been investigated among normal elderly people. Thus, this pilot study aimed to investigate the nature of behavioral dysexecutive symptoms in a sample of normal elderly adults by the means of the Dysexecutive Questionnaire (DEX) (Burgess, Alderman, Evans, Emslie, & Wilson, 1998), by trying to determine possible underlying components, and exploring their relationship with conventional tests of executive functions.
Section snippets
Participants
Twenty elderly adults (10 men and 10 women) recruited through the subject panel of the Aberdeen Psychology Department participated in our experiment.
Their mean age and number of years of schooling were 70.1 (SD=1.6; range=66–74) and 10.4 (SD=1.2), respectively. All participants were free of known neurological or psychiatric illness and were living independently in the community. None of the participants presented signs of global cognitive deterioration as documented by the Mini Mental State
Results
The mean scores on each item of the DEX questionnaire rated by the subjects are reported in Table 1.
The PCA computed from the scores on each item of the DEX produced a 5-factor model, each with an eigenvalue greater than 1 (8.3, 2.4, 1.8, 1.5, and 1.1). This 5-factor model accounted for 75.9% of the total variance. The factor loadings of each DEX-item on the five factors are presented in Table 2. As shown, the items most highly loading on factor 1 were the items 10, 2, and 8, which are related
Discussion
The present study aimed to investigate the nature of behavioral dysexecutive symptoms in normal aging by the means of a PCA issued from the scores on the DEX. The interest of using this statistical technique was to examine the relationships between our set of behavioral variables by transforming them into a new and smaller set of uncorrelated variables evidencing the main behavioral dysexecutive components. Although these results have to be taken with some caution due to the small number of
References (12)
- et al.
Mini-mental state: A practical method for grading the cognitive state of patients for the clinician
Journal of Psychiatric Research
(1975) - et al.
The ecological validity of tests of executive function
Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society
(1998) - et al.
Association between executive attention and physical functional performance in community-dwelling older women
Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences
(1999) Dysexecutive symptoms among a non-clinical sample: A study with the use of the Dysexecutive Questionnaire
British Journal of Psychology
(2001)- et al.
Working Memory and the self-ordered pointing task: Further evidence of early prefrontal decline in normal aging
Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology
(1993) - et al.
Executive cognitive abilities and functional status among community-dwelling older persons in the San Luis Valley Health and Aging Study
Journal of the American Geriatric Society
(1998)
Cited by (93)
Associations of autistic traits, executive dysfunction and the FKBP5 gene with emotion regulation in Chinese college students
2022, Personality and Individual DifferencesCitation Excerpt :The total score of the DEX ranges from 0 to 80, with higher scores indicating greater severity of executive dysfunction. The DEX has been shown to have good psychometric properties and to have utility in clinical (Chan & Manly, 2002) and non-clinical samples (Amieva et al., 2003; Chan, 2001). The Chinese version of the DEX used in the present study has been shown to have satisfactory psychometric properties (Chan, 2001).
C57BL/6 mice as a preclinical model to study age-related cognitive deficits: Executive functions impairment and inter-individual differences
2021, Brain ResearchCitation Excerpt :There is a serious need for developing new therapies to treat cognitive deficits with the aim of improving the quality of life and promoting more autonomy in older humans. Normal aging markedly affects executive functions (Amieva et al., 2003; Bherer et al., 2004; Buscher et al., 2017; Lacreuse et al., 2018). It is for this reason that the present preclinical study mainly focuses on executive functions.
Aging with elevated autistic traits: Cognitive functioning among older adults with the broad autism phenotype
2018, Research in Autism Spectrum DisordersCitation Excerpt :To date, the domains of EF most commonly explored in aging with ASD are generativity/spontaneous flexibility (measured by verbal fluency), reactive flexibility (measured by Trails tasks or a modified Wisconsin Card Sorting Test), planning (measured by towers tests such as the Tower of London), and working memory (measured by spatial span or N-back tasks) (Davids et al., 2016; Geurts & Vissers, 2012; Lever & Geurts, 2016a; Lever, Werkle-Bergner, Brandmaier, Ridderinkhof, & Geurts, 2015; Powell et al., 2017). Although all these EF abilities decline with increasing age, the age at which decline begins and the trajectories of decline differ across domains (Amieva, Phillips, & Sala, 2003; Baltes & Lindenberger, 1997; Hasher, Zacks, & Rahhal, 1999). Furthermore, although several studies exploring cognition in aging with ASD have utilized either the same or very similar measures, the pattern of results is inconsistent across studies (Davids et al., 2016; Geurts & Vissers, 2012; Lever et al., 2015; Powell et al., 2017).
Cognition and lifeguard detection performance
2024, Applied Cognitive Psychology