HF Chen, XL Pan, HM Kong, YM Fu, CC Hu, JW Wang and HJ Shao
Objective: The aims of this study were to investigate the relationship between behavioral and psychological symptoms and cognitive disturbances, ages, educations of patients and investigate the correlations among Neuropsychiatric inventory (NPI) items in patients with vascular dementia (VaD). Methods: NPI and Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) were used to assess the behavioral and psychological symptoms in 120 cases with VaD and 61 cases healthy elders as control group.
Results: The score about delusion, hallucination, agitation, dysphoria, apathy, irritability, aberrant motor and appetite/eating change in the NPI list were significantly increased compared with control group (P<0.05), in which the highest score in turn were dysphoria, apathy and irritability. Among the 8 items in the NPI list, delusion, apathy and aberrant motor were significantly corelated with cognitive disorder (P<0.05), and abnormal behavior was corelated with ages and educations. Besides, NPI factors analysis showed there were three behavioral sub-syndromes, such as psychosis, mood disorder and behavioral disturbance.
Conclusions: Behavioral and psychological symptoms were common in VaD patients, and the frequency and severity of behavioral and psychological symptoms were corelated with cognitive disturbances, ages, and education status at different degrees.