Important note: Information in this article was accurate in December 2001. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.AIDSWEEKLY Plus; Monday, December 17, 2001
Michael Greer, Senior Medical Writer
NewsRx -- Researchers in the United States have shown that HIV infection produces a marked impairment in verbal cognitive function.
"Verbal working memory (WM), which relies on intact functioning of frontostriatal circuits, has been suggested as a cognitive domain that is preferentially affected in HIV-1 infection," explained M.K. York and colleagues at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas.
York and coauthors found evidence that verbal WM is degraded even in early asymptomatic stages of infection and that this impairment worsens as the disease progresses.
They used the working memory model developed by British psychologist Alan Baddely in the early 1970s. By Baddely's tests for measuring the "phonological store," symptomatic HIV patients displayed a reduced capacity for short-term storage of verbal phonological information, study data showed.
Phonological storage ability in asymptomatic patients appeared to be normal, York and coworkers noted. However, both symptomatic and asymptomatic HIV patients had deficiencies in their verbal memory spans.
Articulatory control was not affected by HIV infection in the patients studied (Verbal working memory storage and processing deficits in HIV-1 asymptomatic and symptomatic individuals, Psychol Med 2001 Oct;31(7):1279-91.
"These findings suggest that deficits in simultaneous short-term storage and processing occur during both early and later stages of HIV-1 infection," York and associates concluded.
The corresponding author for this report is W.M. York, Department of Neurosurgery, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX 77030, USA.
Key points reported in this study include
This article was prepared by AIDS Weekly editors from staff and other reports.
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