Fluencja s owna u osób z depresj w przebiegu zaburzeń afektywnych dwubiegunowych

Introduction: Verbal fluency tasks are frequentlyapplied in diagnosis of memory disorder and executivefunctions in people from different clinical groups.Various ways to analyze the task performance aresuggested. The results are correlated with individual andclinical variables, and task procedure (task features).Numerous studies showed differences in level of verbalfluency performance in people with damages of anteriorand posterior areas of brain, and pathology of right orleft hemisphere. Less research concerns verbal fluencyin people with bipolar disorder (BD).Material and methods: Twenty depressive patientssuffering from BD and twenty healthy controls havebeen examined. We have applied two kinds of phonemicfluency tasks (letters K and F) and two kinds of semanticfluency tasks (categories “animals” and “tools”). We haveanalyzed the number of correctly generated words,clusters and switches, also dependence between the kindand the results of tasks (phonemic fluency – highfrequency letters and low frequency letters; semanticfluency – the number of classes: big/small). We haveestimated the influence of individual variables onthe level of verbal fluency.Results: In depressed phase patients with BD achievesignificantly lower results than controls, and the differencesconcern the number of generated words, clusters, andswitches from high frequency categories. The levelof semantic fluency was higher than the level of phonemicfluency in both groups. Individual variables (education, job)modified the level of performance in people with BD only.Conclusions: Depressive individuals with BD presentdifficulties resulted more from deficit of executivefunctions and less from generation of semantic content,which can be related to dysfunction of prefrontal areasand their connections with posterior areas of brain.