Cognitive Communicative Assessment Protocol for Persons with Dementia in Malayalam (CCAPD-M)

Abstract

Dementia is an umbrella term for a group of pathological conditions or syndromes that occur with unsuccessful five areas of mental activity (i) Language (ii) Memory; (iii) Visuospatial skills; (iv) Emotion or personality and (v) Cognition (ex: abstraction, calculation, and judgment). Persons with Dementia (PWD) have trouble producing linguistic information because they have trouble thinking and generating and ordering ideas, in part because information processing capabilities of declarative and working memory systems are disturbed The aim of the current study was to develop an assessment protocol for PWD in Malayalam that can be useful for Speech-Language Pathologist. The developed assessment protocol called 'Cognitive Communicative Assessment Protocol for Persons with Dementia - in Malayalam (CCAPD-M) ' consists of six domains - (i)Memory (ii) Linguistic comprehension (iii) Linguistic expression (iv) Problem solving (v) Organization and (vi) Visuo-spatial construction with a total of twenty four sub domains. CCAPD-M was administered on sixty normal individuals (two groups i.e. between 40-60years and between 60-BOyears) and ten PWD. Results of the study revealed significant deterioration in the performance of normal individuals as the age advanced PWD performed poorly on delayed recall, generative naming, picture naming, categorization, problem solving etc. compared to other domains. This indicated that cognitive decline as well as semantic decline was more in PWD, while the syntactic abilities were better. Executive dysfunction and working memory deficits can account for many of the linguistic deficits in dementia.