Normative data in women aged 85 and older: verbal fluency, digit span, and the CVLT-II short form

Individuals aged 85 years and above (i.e., the oldest old) represent the fastest growing segment of the US population and are at increased risk of developing dementia. This represents an important challenge for the clinical neuropsychologist, as the extant normative data on neuropsychological measures remain relatively limited for this age group. Therefore the aim of the present study was to characterize the performance effects of age and education in a large, well-characterized sample of women between the ages of 85 and 95 years on the California Verbal Learning Test-II (CVLT-II) Short Form (Delis, Kramer, Kaplan, & Ober, 2000), verbal fluency tasks, and the WAIS-III Digit Span Test (Wechsler, 1997 ). In order to minimize the likelihood that women with an incipient neurodegenerative process were included in the final normative sample, we applied regression-based change scores to identify and exclude women who evidenced a statistically significant decline on a global cognitive screening measure over a 20-year interval. The results of our analysis indicate varying influence of age and education on these measures and we provide tables with descriptive statistics stratified by both age and education. Findings from the present normative study are discussed within the context of "robust" longitudinal normative data.