집단미술치료가 알츠하이머형 치매 환자의 시공간 능력에 미치는 영향

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the effect of group art therapy for improving the visuospatial ability in patients with dementia of the Alzheimer's type and to provide the data whether the group art therapy could be applied to patients with dementia in the future. We conducted group art therapy to 10 patients diagnosed with dementia of the Alzheimer's type for a total of 13 times and 3 times/week for 50 minutes and examined its effect on the visuospatial ability. By conducting the Clock Drawing Test and Rey Complex Figure Test that are the tests for evaluating the visuospatial ability, we have analyzed the changes before and after the group art therapy using the Wilcoxon’s signed rank test. We have also analyzed the overlapping of the diagram observed during the program session of group art therapy for the number of deviation errors and changes in the number of reconstructing diagrams by using the Wilcoxon’s signed rank test. The study results obtained through this study are as followed. First, the scores of Clock Drawing Test were significantly increased after conducting the group art therapy program (p<.05). Second, the scores of Rey Complex Figure Test have significantly increased after conducting the group art therapy program (p<.05). Third, the number of diagram overlappings and deviation errors that were observed during the program session of group art therapy has significantly decreased (p<.05) and the number of reconstructing diagrams has significantly increased (p<.05) as well. The results of this study imply that the group art therapy may be useful for patients suffering from dementia of the Alzheimer’s type. Further studies with a large number of samples are required to elucidate the effect of group art therapy on patients with dementia.