Executive control processes in Alzheimer’s disease.

Abstract

It has been recently proposed that executive control (EC) is composed by different subprocesses. In recent times, EC deficits in Alzheimer’s disease patients (AD) have been widely investigated. This analysis is very interesting because, on the one hand, recent studies have observed frontal lobe alterations on these demented patients, and on the other hand, Alzheimer’s disease clinical and behavioural manifestations could be explained by the involvement of EC. This paper discusses in detail the possible involvement of EC subprocesses at the beginning of AD, determining if there would be a widespread decline or dissociations between components and their basic and clinical implications.