1996; Abrahams et al. 1997; Evdokimidis et al. 2002). However, according to Phukan et al. (2007), deficits in this test are less reliably found than in other tests like in those for verbal fluency in patients with ALS. Accordingly, findings of impaired performance on WCST have not been Olaparib mw confirmed in several studies (Ludolph

et al. 1992; Kew et al. 1993; Talbot et al. 1995). Impairments in the attentional system are often associated with damage of the frontal lobes. Attention deficits have been described in ALS, especially with concern to selective and divided attention (Vieregge et al. 1999; Schreiber et al. 2005; Pinkhardt et Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical al. 2008). Problems with concentration and distractibility have been described for the Stroop Test; Evdokimidis et al. (2002) correlated the difficulties in Wisconsin Card Sorting Test and Stroop Test with distractibility factor scores for an anti-saccade ocular motor paradigm, which represents another valid test of frontal lobe function, that allows to avoid motor and verbal responses. Patients Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical with ALS show cognitive deficits

also in other areas than Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical executive function, but the evidence is less consistent. For example, there is no agreement about memory decline: several studies have reported impairment in short-term memory (Gallassi et al. 1989; Kew et al. 1993; Hanagasi et al. 2002), while deficits in delayed recall are variable, suggesting a disorder in the encoding of information rather than in the

speed of forgetting. Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical Mantovan et al. (2003) detected a poor primacy effect, that is indicative of a long-term memory deficit, and suggested that poor performance on memory tests may be indicative of a failure to generate stable long-memory traces at encoding Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical rather than a failure in memory retrieval. However, there is no agreement in the selleckchem interpretation of memory failures in terms of frontal lobe dysfunction: impairments in delayed recall (of three words and a short story) were assumed by Iwasaki et al. (1990) as an effect of medial temporal lobe pathology, on the basis of the role of the medial temporal lobes in recall of learned information. Language abnormalities have also been described and they included impoverished verbal output (Strong et al. 1999; AV-951 Bak and Hodges 2004), deficits in confrontation and objects naming (Massman et al. 1996; Strong et al. 1999; Bak and Hodges 2004; Abrahams et al. 2005), difficulties in syntactic comprehension (Rakowicz and Hodges 1998), and paraphasias (Rakowicz and Hodges 1998; Strong et al. 1999). However, some studies have found no naming deficits in ALS patients (Kew et al. 1993; Abrahams et al. 2000), so the existence of a true aphasic disorder is still a matter of debate. Moreover, the difficulty in distinguishing articulatory from linguistic disturbances complicates the interpretation of the aphasic-like symptoms.