Evaluation of formation of past tense of regular and irregular verbs in persian-speaking patients with parkinson's disease

Parkinson's disease [PD] is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that results in damage to the basal ganglia. [PD] patients suffer from a wide range of motor and cognitive symptoms. Also there is a group of language and grammatical disorders such as failure to understand complex sentences, shortening sentences and removing prepositions and phrases in patient with PD. This study investigates the formation of past tense of regular and irregular verbs and comprehension of passive sentences by Persian-speaking PD patients and compares their behavior with normal speakers. Twenty patients with PD and 30 healthy subjects, between 60 to 80 participate in this study. All participants were Persian-speaking male and monolingual. We used Mini-Mental State Examiniation [MMSE], Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale [UPDRS] and Modified Hoehn and Yahr scale for assessing cognitive state in both groups and staging of PD in patients group. Formation of past tense-regular and irregular verbs in both groups were compared by declarative-procedural model. Our result showed unlike healthy group there is a significant difference between formation of regular and irregular verbs in patients with PD [P=0/023]. Also there is a significant difference betweenbothgroupsinformationofregularverbs [P=0/002].Onthebasis of the result, we concluded that there is a functional separation between processing of regular and irregular verbs in patient with PD that is not observed in healthy subjects

Demographic variables and selective, sustained attention and planning through cognitive tasks among healthy adults

Introduction: Cognitive tasks are considered to be applicable and appropriate in assessing cognitive domains. The purpose of our study is to determine the relationship existence between variables of age, sex and education with selective, sustained attention and planning abilities by means of computerized cognitive tasks among healthy adults. Methods: A cross-sectional study was implemented during 6 months from June to November, 2010 on 84 healthy adults [42 male and 42 female]. The whol participants performed computerized CPT, STROOP and TOL tests after being content and trained. Results: The obtained data indicate that there is a significant correlation coefficient between age, sex and education variables [p<0.05]. Discussion: The above-mentioned tests can be used to assess selective, sustained attention and planning