P1‐470: INCIDENCE OF DEMENTIA IN MEXICAN OLDER ADULTS AND ITS ASSOCIATION WITH PERFORMANCE IN CONSTRUCTIVE PRAXIS, SEMANTIC VERBAL FLUENCY, AND DELAYED RECALL TASKS IN A THREE‐YEAR FOLLOW‐UP

Abstract

Dementia is a growing public health problem worldwide. Straightforward and accessible tools are needed in order to identify subjects at risk of developing cognitive impairment. Specific neuropsychological assessments can be used to detect subtle cognitive changes, and have the advantage of being low-cost, simple and time-effective. It has been reported that the test of verbal semantic fluency1, delayed recall2and constructive praxis3are useful test to predict incident dementia. We analyzed a subsample of 1,226 subjects from the Mexican arm of the 10/66 Dementia Research Group aged 65 years or older, without dementia, in a three-year follow-up. Cognitive tests studied included constructional praxis with the task of pentagons and circles copy, three-word delayed recall and animal category semantic verbal fluency task subtests from the Cognitive Screening Instrument for Dementia (CSI-D), with a total application time of approximately five minutes. After adjusting for age, neuropsychiatric symptoms, diabetes, and illiteracy we found significant associations between: incident dementia and CSI-D pentagon and circles copy subtest risk ratio (RR) = 2.28, confidence interval (CI) 95% 1.30-4.00); and with three-word delayed recall subtest RR= 2.20, (CI 95% 1.40-3.46). No association was found between verbal fluency and incident dementia. It is possible to identify below par performance in constructive praxis and delayed recall tasks years before the onset of dementia-related cognitive decline, which implies that these evaluations, are adequate neuropsychological screening tools to detect subjects at risk to develop dementia. These tests are easy to implement, low-cost and applicable in population-based studies and in first-contact clinical contexts. References. [1] Alegret, M. et al. (2018) Journal of Alzheimer's Disease 62, 611–619 [2] Zhao et al. (2012) PLoS One. 7, (12) [3] Serra et al. (2014) Journal of Alzheimer's Disease 38, (2), 391-402.