Abstract
The neuropsychological battery used in Fundació ACE (NBACE) is a relatively brief, and easy to administer, test battery that was designed to detect cognitive impairment in the adulthood. The NBACE includes measures of cognitive information processing speed, orientation, attention, verbal learning and memory, language, visuoperception, praxis and executive functions. The aim of the present study was to establish the cut-off scores for impairment for different levels of age and education that could be useful in the cognitive assessment of Spanish subjects who are at risk for cognitive impairment, especially dementia. Data from 1018 patients with a mild dementia syndrome, and 512 cognitively healthy subjects, older than 44 years, from the Memory Clinic of Fundació ACE (Barcelona, Spain) were analyzed. In the whole sample, cut-off scores and sensitivity/specificity values were calculated for six conditions after combining 3 age ranges (44 to 64; 65 to 74; and older than 74 years old) by 2 educational levels (until Elementary school; and more than Elementary school). Moreover, general cut-offs are reported for Catalan and Spanish speakers. The results showed that most of NBACE tests reached good sensitivity and specificity values, except for Ideomotor praxis, Repetition and Verbal Comprehension tests, which had a ceiling effect. Word List Learning from the Wechsler Memory Scale-III and Semantic Verbal Fluency were the most useful tests to discriminate between cognitively healthy and demented subjects. The NBACE has been shown to be a useful tool able to detect cognitive impairment, especially dementia, in older than 44 years Spanish persons.
Highlights
Neuropsychological assessment is critical for the diagnosis of clinical dementia syndromes or other forms of cognitive impairment [1,2]
With regard to MDS group, inclusion criteria were: A diagnosis of MDS, with a mild severity of dementia determined by a total Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR; [32]) of 1 and a MiniMental State Examination (MMSE; [27]) higher than 19
When the area under the curve (AUC) was greater than 0.75, the cut-offs were reported after identifying the cut-off score that yielded approximately equal sensitivity and specificity values
Summary
Neuropsychological assessment is critical for the diagnosis of clinical dementia syndromes or other forms of cognitive impairment [1,2]. There is a need for brief neuropsychological batteries, covering a wide range of cognitive functions, able to detect subtle deficits in clinical settings. In Spain, tests have been usually translated from English versions and adapted using foreign population normative data. A few neuropsychological screening batteries, adapted for Spanishspeaking individuals, have been adapted to include age and education adjusted normative values [15,16,17,18,19]. All of these tests were standardized by administering them to a representative sample of cognitively healthy individuals to establish normative scores
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