Communication in Communication in

Alzheimer’s disease, the leading cause of dementia, is a neurodegenerative process that diminishes one’s ability to communicate. Two widely used measures of quantifying dementia severity, the Global Deterioration Scale and the Functional Assessment Staging scale, indicate that all verbal capacity is lost by the late stages of the disease. In this study the language skills of individuals with late-stage Alzheimer’s disease were assessed using the Functional Linguistic Communication Inventory. Although there was variability in performance, all study participants produced more verbal language than would be predicted from either of these scales. These results call into question the characterization of verbal language on the Global Deterioration Scale and the Functional Assessment Staging scale.