Verbal Fluency in Metabolic Syndrome.

Metabolic syndrome (MetS) or otherwise insulin resistance (IR) is described as a cluster of several commonly occurring disorders, including abdominal obesity; lipids disorders, such as hypertriglyceridemia; and low levels of high-density-lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C), hypertension (≥130/85 mmHg), and carbohydrates disorders, such as impaired fasting glucose or diabetes mellitus type 2. Type 2 diabetes (T2DM) constitutes insulin resistance, which is a strong risk factor for strokes. Patients with MetS are often prone to cognitive decline. Metabolic risk factors, hypertension, and diabetes, amongst them, have been hypothesized to play a great role in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and the development of vascular dementia. For neuropsychological diagnostic and theoretical purposes verbal fluency is defined as a cognitive function that facilitates information retrieval from memory. It engages executive control and other cognitive processes, such as selective attention, selective inhibition, mental set shifting, internal response generation, and self-monitoring, as well as imagination and psychomotor skills. A total of 90 subjects, divided into 2 groups, patients with MetS (45) and healthy controls (45), were assessed. A significant difference in performance was found between the patients and controls, both in the phonetic (