Standard values of frontal cognitive functioning tests for those over 60 years of age

Introduction. There are some neuropsychological test with a good sensibility for cognitive disorders affecting, frontal lobe damage. Aim. To provide normative data for test that assess frontal cognitive function in population over 60 years old. Subjects and methods. 110 neurologically healthy volunteers over 60 years old, recruited from different primary care centers from Barcelona, participated in the study and were assessed by the Trail Making Test-A (TTA), the verbal fluency test FAS and the similarities test. Results. The mean age of the sample was 71.5 years-old (DE: 6.7). The mean years of education was 8.6 (DE: 4.4). 60% of the subjects were women. The mean score obtained in TTA was 64.2 (DE: 26.0), 24.5 (DE: 11.8) in FAS and 12.5 (DE: 5.2) in similarities test. Years of education result a high significant factor for predicting the performance in all the frontal test. Gender only influenced the performance in TTA. Age did not influence the performance in any of these test. Conclusions. This findings support the idea that years of education is the most influencing factor in the performance in frontal cognitive test in normal aged population.