A Case study by Jessica A. Hehman, Tim P. German, and Stanley B. Klein

Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara 2005

A Presentation by Amarallys Cintron

Stage Characteristics

Initial Stage

Early Stage

Intermediate Stage

Late Stage

End Stage

Mild forgetfulness

Increase word-finding problems, decline in spatial memory

General cognitive deficits in reasoning and judgment; help needed in common daily tasks

Person may not recognize family members, loss of communicative skills;

Death

Stages of Alzheimer’s

Sense of Self

Patients with late stage Alzheimer’s demonstrate a loss of sense of self

Late stage patients exhibit a decline in use of personal pronouns and changes in the content of self–narratives

A late stage patient from a previous study, K.R. could correctly identify her personality characteristics although they were “out of date”

Objective

To determine the effects of Alzheimer’s disease on the concept of one’s self

Hypothesis:

Alzheimer’s disease entails a gradual breakdown in the mechanisms used to acquire and update personal knowledge

Participant

P.H. 83 year old woman Diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 1996 Otherwise in good health and under the

treatment of Aricept P.H. was given the Mini Mental State Exam

and got a score of 7. A score of 22 or less is considered “definitely abnormal” for her age group.

Experiment

Photos of P.H. are categorized by decade from her 20s to her 70s

She asked if she recognized the person in the photo, then she was asked to identify the person and give information about the picture

Results

Pictures from her 20s and 30s were correctly identified seven out of eight times

Pictures from her 40s to 70s were correctly identified only twice out of 20 times

What does this tell us?

Alzheimer’s disease may degrade self memory in such a way as to leave remnants of earlier representational states including personality and one’s appearance.

This could prove that Alzheimer’s disease impairs routines that update assorted databases of self–related knowledge

What could cause this?

It is proposed that Alzheimer’s may cause a temporally graded breakdown in semantic self knowledge

This can account both for patient K.R.’s inability to update her semantic self–knowledge for personality changes taking place

Also accounts for patient P.H.’s problems recognizing herself from pictures taken during the later decades of her life.

What is unknown?

Could this gradual breakdown caused by Alzheimer’s be treatable?

Would this breakdown preserve all self memories in the earlier decades of life or just some?

Questions?