[Interpretation of proverbs and Alzheimer's disease]

To evaluate the performance of patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) in the mild-moderate stage in a verbal material abstraction task that involves interpreting the implicit meaning of proverbs and sayings.

A qualitative-quantitative analysis was carried out of the performance of 30 patients with AD and 30 controls, paired by age, gender and level of education.

Patients had significantly greater difficulties than the controls when it came to interpreting proverbs. A high correlation was found between subjects' years of schooling and the overall score on the proverb interpretation test. Results suggest that the processes that may be predominantly affected in patients with AD are the investigation of the conditions of the problem, together with selecting an alternative and formulating a cognitive plan to resolve the task.

The results help to further our knowledge of the characteristics of performance of patients with AD in a test involving the interpretation of the implicit meaning of proverbs and also provide information about the processes that may be predominantly affected. Further research is needed, however, on this subject area in order to obtain more conclusive explanations.