Subcortical arteriosclerotic encephalopathy--a controlled psychometric study.

Eleven patients with subcortical arteriosclerotic encephalopathy (SAE) were assessed psychometrically, and the results compared with control subjects without neurological disorders and patients with a single cerebral vascular lesion (CVL). The groups were matched for sex, age, years of education, and in addition for the CVL group, the nature, site and size of the discrete vascular lesion. The SAE patients had mild to moderate impairment in intellectual, memory, receptive language and constructional functions, but individual performance ranged from near normality to severe impairment. The differences between the performance of SAE patients and the controls were significant in the majority of tests. The SAE patients had lower scores than CVL patients on all tests, but in many of these the difference was not significant.