January 26, 2022Memory is impaired in both older adults with ADHD and those with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). However, distinctions do exist; those with MCI experience a storage deficit (indicated by relatively smaller hippocampi) and those with ADHD encounter an encoding deficit (indicated by frontal lobe thinning.) This finding comes from a new study published in the Journal of Attention Disorders that also found reason to question previous findings that ADHD may be a risk factor for dementia.1ADHD is not well-recognized in older adults, in part because patients’ cognitive difficulties are often mistaken for MCI.
To establish the shared and unique cognitive and imaging characteristics of older adults with ADHD or MCI, participants from a cognitive neurology clinic (40 with ADHD, 29 with MCI, and 37 controls) underwent neuropsychological assessment by a team of researchers from the University of Calgary and University of Toronto.Older adults with ADHD and those with MCI both displayed normal executive functioning.
Participants with ADHD performed similarly to controls in a context with added semantic structure, indicating a frontally mediated encoding deficit in ADHD and a temporally mediated storage deficit in MCI.
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