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Neurology 1999;52:71
© 1999 American Academy of Neurology
Articles

Neuroanatomic correlates of visual agnosia in Alzheimer’s disease

A clinicopathologic study P. Giannakopoulos, MD, G. Gold, MD, M. Duc, MPsych, J.-P. Michel, MD, P. R. Hof, MD and C. Bouras, MD

From the Departments of Psychiatry (Drs. Giannakopoulos and Bouras) and Geriatrics (M. Duc and Drs. Gold and Michel), HUG Belle-Idée, University of Geneva School of Medicine, Geneva, Switzerland; and Neurobiology of Aging Laboratories and Fishberg Research Center for Neurobiology (Drs. Hof and Bouras) and the Departments of Geriatrics and Adult Development and Ophthalmology (Dr. Hof), Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, NY.

Address correspondence and reprint requests to Dr. Panteleimon Giannakopoulos, Department of Psychiatry, Clinic of Geriatric Psychiatry, HUG Belle-Idée, 2 Chemin du Petit Bel-Air, CH-1225 Geneva, Switzerland; e-mail: giannako{at}cmu.unige.ch

OBJECTIVE: To examine the neuroanatomic correlates of visual agnosia in AD.

METHODS: The authors performed an anterograde clinicopathologic study of 23 patients with clinically and neuropathologically confirmed AD in a 305-bed acute care geriatric hospital and a 165-bed acute care psychiatric hospital. The presence of apperceptive visual agnosia was assessed using the Ghent’s overlapping figure test and the Gottschaldt’s hidden figure test. Associative visual agnosia was examined using the conceptual items of the Columbia Mental Maturity Test. Correlations between neurofibrillary tangle (NFT) and senile plaque (SP) densities and visual agnosia were studied using forward stepwise logistic regression.

RESULTS: A statistically significant relation was found between NFT densities in Brodmann’s areas 18, 19, and 37, and associative visual agnosia, whereas NFT densities in the areas studied did not correlate with the presence of apperceptive visual agnosia. Senile plaque counts did not correlate with any of the neuropsychological parameters.

CONCLUSIONS: These results support the existence of a dichotomy between associative and apperceptive agnosia, and show that only the former is related to the damage of secondary and high-order visual association areas in AD. In addition, the results suggest that SP densities do not represent a valuable pathologic correlate of visual agnosia in this disorder.




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