* Address correspondence to: Giovanni A. Carlesimo, IRCCS S. Lucia, V. Ardeatina, 306, 00179 Roma, Italy.
Accepted for publication: July 14, 1997.
Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology
1380-3395/98/2001-014$12.00
1998, Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 14-29
© Swets & Zeitlinger
Memory Performances in Young, Elderly, and Very Old
Healthy Individuals versus Patients with Alzheimer’s
Disease: Evidence for Discontinuity Between Normal and
Pathological Aging*
Giovanni A. Carlesimo1, Marco Mauri2, Anita M. S. Graceffa1, Lucia Fadda4, Antonella Loasses1,
Sebastiano Lorusso3, and Carlo Caltagirone1,4
1I.R.C.C.S. S. Lucia, Roma, Italy, 2I.R.C.C.S. C. Mondino, Pavia, Italy, 3Servizio di Neurologia, Ospedale di
Rimini, Italy, and 4Clinica Neurologica, Università di Roma ‘‘Tor Vergata’’, Italy
ABSTRACT
In this study we compared memory performances of 29 probable patients with AD (17 mildly and 12 mod-
erately demented) with those of 39 healthy young subjects, 36 elderly subjects (matched with the AD group
for age and years of schooling), and 19 healthy very old subjects. In most of the memory tasks used in the
present study, a progressive decline in performance was observed passing from the Young to the Elderly
to the Very Old to the AD group. However, patients with AD were selectively impaired in the backward
reproduction of verbal and spatial span sequences and in the semantic encoding of verbal material. These
data are consistent with the hypothesis of not only quantitative but also a qualitative discontinuity between
the process of normal aging and the dementia syndrome.
‘‘Does Alzheimer’s disease represent an exag-
geration of normal aging?’’ This is the title of
Leonard Berg’s (1985) stimulating paper re-
viewing neuropathological, biochemical, and
clinical evidence supporting either a continuum
or a distinction between the physiological pro-
cess through which a normal individual becomes
old and the pathological condition known as
Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Recent reports
describing a possible role of genetic factors