O discurso narrativo na doença de Alzheimer
AUTOR(ES)
Adriana Bastos
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO
2000
RESUMO
Lnguistic problems are among the initial symptons of Alzheimer s disease (AD), and their presence is a necessary condition to the diagnosis according to the criteria of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV). The linguistic studies of patients with AD have been restricted to a lexical-semantic and syntatic analysis, putting aside the discursive leveL wich can be precociously disturbed in this disease. A more comprehensive linguistic-cognitive study can contribute to a better diagnosis of AD at its early stages. In this dissertation we attempt to describe and analyse the narrative problems of patients with AD, adopting as a methodology the study of multiple cases, including five patients with probable AD of mild to moderate degree and five controls matched by age, gender and education. For that, we used a theorical background based, on the one hand, on the notion of complex functional systems (neuropychological model proposed by Luria) , interlinked to Vygotsky s postulate concerning cognitive organization and function and, on the other hand, on discursive conception of the language proposed by the social-cognitive perspective of the Textual Linguistic. We preferred the use of two types of evaluative approaches: a quantitative one, made through a neuropsychological evaluation comprehending (1) attention/concentration (vigilance test of Strub &Black,1977); (2) visual perception (subtest of Luria s battery); (3) memory (WMS-R logical memory subtest); (4) language (Boston Naming Test, vocabulary of WAIS-R, verbal fluency - category: animal) and a qualitative one, proposing narrative production tasks: (1) a self - generate account of a memorable experience; (2) narrative interpretation of thematic pictures (sequential: "The cowboy story" and non-sequential: "The cookie theft"). The results of this study suggest that the narrative-discurse difficulties of patients with AD can be secondary to practognostic and/or visual-spacial deficits that blocks them from grasping iconographic macroestruture necessary to the conversion of the image into a narrative text or, resulting from a failure in this discursive memory
