Validation of the Spanish version of the Mini‐Linguistic State Examination for the diagnosis of primary progressive aphasia

Abstract

AbstractBackgroundPrimary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a clinical syndrome of neurodegenerative origin with three main clinical variants (nonfluent, semantic, and logopenic). Clinical diagnosis and accurate classification into the three clinical variants is challenging and often time‐consuming. The Mini‐Linguistic State Examination (MLSE) has been recently developed as a short language test specifically designed for language assessment in neurodegenerative disorders. Our aim was to adapt and validate the Spanish version of MLSE for PPA diagnosis.MethodCross‐sectional study involving 70 patients with PPA and 42 healthy controls were evaluated with the MLSE. Patients were independently diagnosed and classified according to a comprehensive cognitive and advanced neuroimaging.ResultInternal consistency was 0.702. Influence of age and education was very low. The area under the curve for discriminating PPA patients and healthy controls was 0.989. Effect sizes were moderate‐large for the discrimination between PPA and healthy controls. In addition, motor speech, phonology and semantics subscores discriminated between the three clinical variants.ConclusionOur study provides a useful and brief language test for the diagnosis of PPA with excellent properties for both clinical routine assessment and research purposes.