Elsevier

Cortex

Volume 28, Issue 2, June 1992, Pages 231-239
Cortex

Verbal Fluency and Positron Emission Tomographic Mapping of Regional Cerebral Glucose Metabolism

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Abstract

Impairment in verbal fluency (VF) has been a consistently reported clinical feature of focal cerebral deficits in frontal and temporal regions. More recent behavioral activation studies with healthy control subjects using positron emission tomography (PET), however, have noted a negative correlation between performance on verbal fluency tasks and regional cortical activity. To see if this negative relationship extends to steady-state non-activation PET measures, thirty-three healthy adults were given a VF task within a day of their 18F-2-fluoro-2-deoxy-D-glucose PET scan. VF was found to correlate positively with left temporal cortical region metabolic activity but to correlate negatively with right and left frontal activity. VF was not correlated significantly with right temporal cortical metabolic activity. Some previous studies with normals using behavioral activation paradigms and PET have reported negative correlations between metabolic activity and cognitive performance similar to that reported here. An explanation for the disparate relationships that were observed between frontal and temporal brain areas and VF might be found in the mediation of different task demands by these separate locations, i.e., task planning and/or initiation by frontal regions and verbal memory by the left temporal area.

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a

Dr. Bruno Giordani, Neuropsychology Program, Rm. 480, Med Inn, Box 0840, University of Michigan Medical Center, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-0840, U.S.A.