RESEARCH ARTICLE
Neuropsychological and Syntactic Deficits in HIV Seropositive Males
Maria Kambanaros1, *, Lambros Messinis2, Mina Psichogiou3, Lydia Leonidou4, Charalambos A. Gogos4, Grigorios Nasios5, Panagiotis Papathanasopoulos6
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2019Volume: 13
First Page: 107
Last Page: 118
Publisher ID: TONEUJ-13-107
DOI: 10.2174/1874205X01913010107
Article History:
Received Date: 14/04/2019Revision Received Date: 28/08/2019
Acceptance Date: 21/08/2019
Electronic publication date: 30/09/2019
Collection year: 2019
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Objective:
Given the underlying frontal-basal ganglia circuit neuropathogenesis of HIV-infected individuals, it is surprising that little is reported about potential language deficits as part of their higher cognitive dysfunctional profile. This study aims to elucidate whether HIV-positive individuals have linguistic impairments that may originate from or be intensified by deficits in cognitive functions. The research questions address (i) quantitative differences in sentence repetition abilities involving complex syntactic phenomena between adults with HIV and non-HIV healthy controls (ii) correlations of sentence repetition scores with neurocognitive measures and (iii) correlation of sentence repetition performance with duration and severity of HIV.
Methods:
A battery of neuropsychological tests were administered to 40 HIV - seropositive males and 40 demographically matched healthy controls to assess verbal learning/episodic memory, psychomotor speed, executive functions and visuospatial abilities. Language abilities were evaluated using a repetition task that screened specific complex syntactic operations at the sentence-level.
Results:
A significant difference was noted between the two groups regarding correct repetition of the sentence repetition task with the control group outperforming the HIV-seropositive group. For the HIV group, significant correlations were found for correct sentence repetition with years of education, duration of illness, Mini-Mental State Examination, semantic and phonemic fluency, symbol digit modality test scores, and the Trail Making Test (parts A and B).
Conclusion:
Speech-language pathologists and neuropsychologists should screen for language deficits associated with the different clinical syndromes in HIV patients as part of their routine clinical care.
