[Neuro-psychological disorders in hypothyroid dementia. Description of case]

Hypothyroidism is one of the most frequent causes of treatable symptomatic dementia. However a detailed description of its neuropsychologic characteristics in the medical literature is lacking. We have studied a 70 year old patient suffering severe mental deterioration, cerebellopathy, myopathy and hypothyroidism with a complete set of neuropsychologic and psychometric tests: mental mini-examination, Blessed's scale, neuropsychologic examination, WAIS, Bento visual retention test, Rey's picture, words learning, delayed recall of words, verbal fluency, reaction times and maintained attention. This type of dementia is characterized by a low score in all tests which improves progressively with the treatment and it is also accompanied by a lack of language defects, nonconstructive apraxia or agnosia. The recovery involves the attentional field and the memory as well as the two intelligence indices. However this improvement is more apparent in the tests related to attention and visuospatial information processing. It is concluded that hypothyroid dementia in this patient had characteristics "subcortical dementia" and a neuropsychologic deterioration pattern rather nonspecific with a slight predominance of the attentional and visuospatial defects.