NeuroBel: Spanish screening test for oral psycholinguistics disabilities in elderly people with mild cognitive impairment and early-stage Alzheimer’s disease

Abstract

IntroductionThe NeuroBel is a short test that allows for psycholinguistic assessment of basic processes of oral comprehension and language production deterioration in the elderly. The objective is to carry out a pilot study of the initial reference values and cut-off points of this battery using a sample of Spanish elderly adults, with and without cognitive impairment, and detecting performance differences among them. MethodNeuroBel consists of 8 tasks that analyze oral language functioning from the theoretical model proposed by the Psycholinguistic approach. Seventy-five Spanish monolingual adult-elderly participants of both genders. Of those, 25 with Alzheimer's disease (AD) in the initial phase, 25 with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and 25 participants without cognitive impairment (Controls). All subjects were evaluated using NeuroBel. ResultsThere are significant differences between the three groups. The participants with AD are significantly worse in the total score of NeuroBel. A discriminant analysis shows that 86.7% of the cases appear correctly classified in the groups originally selected. Likewise, participants with MCI obtained results that are statistically significantly worse than the control group. NeuroBel shows a high correlation with the MMSE (.89) and Sensitivity (.96) in the determination of AD and cognitive deterioration (AD + MCI vs. Controls). The area under the ROC curve is .97 in the contrast of AD vs. Controls and .98 in the determination of cognitive deterioration (AD + MCI vs. Controls). The canonical discriminant functions and the precision cut-offs from the ROC analyses are also shown in the results. ConclusionsNeuroBel is shown as a “very good” test in the detection of cognitive-linguistic impairment in elderly-adults.