Background: Dementia is characterized by progressive memory loss and other cognitive impairments. Memory
impairments are apparent on tasks that require learning and retention of verbal or non-verbal information. Demented
patients present severe impairments on recognition and recalling tasks. They have severe deficits in
transferring information in to a long-term storage system. The present study investigated any difference between
various memory processes in different reproduction phases contribute to discrimination between demented and
non-demented elderly patients.
Methods: Thirty one demented and 25 non-demented elderly patients were selected according to inclusion
criteria; all of them were visited by a physician completing the Mini Mental Status Examination (MMSE) and
California Verbal Learning Test-Persian version (CVLT-P).
Results: Although demented and non-demented elderly subjects had no difference in relation to age and education,
differences on clinical variables were significant and demented patients showed lower means than nondemented
ones. A discriminate function analysis showed that CVLT-P had the ability to differentiate between
demented and non-demented elderly patients and could correctly classify 94.3% of demented and non-demented
older adults.
Conclusion: Findings suggest that CVLT-P could discriminate satisfaction between these two groups and according
to subscales, learning slope had the highest discrimination coefficient. So demented patients had more
deficits in hippocampus causing failure of learning.