Associate Professor, Department of Special Education, Baekseok University, # 76 Moonam-ro, Dongnam-gu, Cheonan-si, Chungcheongnam-do, 31065, Republic of Korea
Online published on 7 December, 2018.
Once dementia develops, the cognitive problems associated with memory gradually worsen. The purpose of this study was to provide word finding intervention and to investigate changes in the performance of the subject during the intervention.
The subject was an 85-year-old woman suffering from Alzheimer's dementia, which was progressing from mild to moderate stages. The word finding intervention was composed of 30 sessions. The number of words remembered by the subject was calculated and scored by counting the number of syllables and the number of words per part of speech. Also, changes in other related performances throughout the intervention were observed.
As the number of words increased throughout the intervention sessions, though there were few dips in the number, it remained relatively high as time progressed than what it was at the beginning of the training. Eventually, the increase in numbers showed a tendency to slow down slightly. The rate of improvement at the beginning of the intervention was faster than the rate at the end of the intervention. Most of the words remembered were mainly composed of two syllable nouns. The errors in the two-digit multiplication and addition persisted throughout the entire intervention. And the letters were not written uniformly throughout the entire intervention.
The results of this study can be used as basic data to provide cognitive intervention in the elderly with Alzheimer's dementia.
Alzheimer, Dementia, Elderly, word finding, Intervention
