Elsevier

Brain and Cognition

Volume 53, Issue 2, November 2003, Pages 129-132
Brain and Cognition

Behavioral dysexecutive symptoms in normal aging

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0278-2626(03)00094-0Get rights and content

Abstract

Executive deficits of normal aging such as deficits in planning, organization or decision making are likely to affect elderly individuals in their daily life functioning. Therefore, executive functioning in aging seems to be interesting to study not only in cognitive terms but also in relation to the behavioral area. This pilot study aimed to investigate the nature of behavioral dysexecutive problems in a sample of normal elderly adults as measured by the Dysexecutive Questionnaire. Factor analysis showed that five interpretable factors could be derived from the DEX: intentionality (factor 1), interference management (factor 2), inhibition (factor 3), planning (factor 4), and social regulation (factor 5), suggesting that different components may underlie the behavioral dysexecutive symptoms of normal aging. The relationship between these factors and neuropsychological measures of Executive Functions were also briefly explored.

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

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