A simple counting of verbal fluency errors discriminates between normal cognition, mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s disease

ABSTRACT

For this observational cross-sectional study, different modalities of verbal fluency tasks (VFTs) were compared between 143 participants: 35 cognitively healthy controls (CHCs), 71 mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and 37 mild Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients. Binomial logistic regression models were defined to identify VFT variables associated with MCI and AD, with respect to CHC. The results showed that the best errors/repetitions variable associated with MCI and AD was the phonemic task, and with every error the odds of being in the MCI group increased 9.9 times and 12.2 times in AD group, accompanied by high accuracy values (MCI: AUC = 0.824, sensitivity = 0.676, specificity = 0.943; AD: AUC = 0.883, sensitivity = 0.784, specificity = 0.943). The results suggest that, in addition to solely register raw scores, a simple counting of errors and repetitions during VFT can offer valuable clues in detecting MCI and AD, especially in the phonemic task.

KEYWORDS:

• Alzheimer’s disease
• Mild cognitive impairment
• Dementia
• verbal fluency
• verbal fluency errors

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to salute Professor Letícia Lessa Mansur (in memory) for all her contributions and mentoring to the national research on the study of language and aging.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

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Additional information

Funding

MAC is supported by Principal Career Development Scholarship grant from The University of Edinburgh, UK.