كاركردهاي شناختي- اجرايي قطعه پيشاني مغز در سالمندان

Cognitive-executive functions of brain frontal lobe in aged adults

Introduction: Immediate clinical diagnosis of cognitive disorders in older adults can cause timely intervention. The goal of this study was to investigate the executive-cognitive functions of Iranian older adults using clinical measures.Method: This cross sectional study with categorical random sampling was conducted on 150 elderly people in Qom Province in 2007 (Iran- Qom). Research instrument included mini-mental state examination (MMSE) and clinical tests of evaluation of cognitive executive functions of frontal lobe (Trail Making Test, Verbal Fluency Test and Digit Span Test). ANOVA and Independent T-Test were used for statistical analysis. Results: Mini-mental state examination (MMSE) affected by age, gender and education (P<0.01). The efficiency of other used tests had no difference in both genders (P> 0.05). Semantic verbal fluency and working memory had higher performance in lower age and higher education (P< 0.01). Psychomotor speed (Trail Making Test; first part), showed significant correlation with education (P<0.01), but cognitive flexibility (Trail Making Test; first part) did not show any significant difference (P>0.05). Conclusion: Working memory performance is reduced with increasing the age and in all cognitive evaluations concerning cognitive functions the role of education should be taken into account. Education is a protector factor against cognitive deterioration resulted from senescence.