Avaliação das funções executivas em idosos : evidências de validade convergente e dados normativos do Teste Wisconsin de classificação de cartas versão reduzida de 64 cartas para idosos

Abstract

Technological advances and scientific developments have been generating a significant increase in human longevity. Therefore, it is important to think about the quality with which these longer years may be lived, as well as to study the specificities of cognitive aging in order to enable early diagnosis of degenerative diseases. There is a predominance of studies related to memory performance in the elderly, to the detriment of other cognitive functions. Consequently, the development and the construction of instruments to evaluate executive functions have received little clinical significance. Executive functions refer to the strategies for problem solving and to the ability to adapt to daily routines. This study aims at studying the evaluation of executive functions through a preliminary study of convergent validity and normative data from the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test - 64-card version (WCST-64) - to the elderly. WCST-64 has proven to be an important evaluation tool of the executive functioning, and has become increasingly popular among researchers, for it highlights the need for normative data from this test to the Brazilian population. The qualifying exam of this thesis is a transversal study developed in five complementary studies. Two hundred and eleven elderly, aged from 60 to 89 (M= 69.08 years old), from the urban area of Porto Alegre composed the sample. This study used the following instruments for data collection: a Socio-demographic Data Form, the Geriatric Depression Scale, Katz´s Scale, Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), Direct and Indirect Digit Span, the Trail Making Test, Tower of London test, the Rey Auditory-Verbal Test, the Phonemic Verbal Fluency Test, the Semantic Verbal Fluency Test using the category Animals, the Katz Index, the Vocabulary, the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test – both the 64-card version (WCST-64) and the complete version. Participants had an average of 11.04 years of schooling and they were mostly women (79.3%). The most common marital status was either to be married or to have a cohabitant (44.6%) and most of them had a positive perception of health (67%). The majority of the sample (80.8%) did not show any depressive symptomatology. The results of this study enabled the composition of a preliminary normative standard of the elderly Brazilian population's performance in the WCST-64. The results showed the influence of the variables education and age in the WCST-64 performance. Furthermore, the elderly who showed depressive symptoms, compared to those who did not, made more mistakes and thus were not able to achieve more categories. Similarly, the group with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) had worse performance in this test, when compared to the group without MCI. In addition, it was found an association between WCST-64, WCST-128 and other tests that assess executive functions, suggesting evidences of convergent validity.