Are subjective language complaints in memory clinic patients informative?

ABSTRACT

To diagnose mild cognitive impairment, it is crucial to understand whether subjective cognitive complaints reflect objective cognitive deficits. This question has mostly been investigated in the memory domain, with mixed results. Our study was one of the first to address it for language. Participants were 55-to-93-year-old memory clinic patients (n = 163). They filled in a questionnaire about subjective language and memory complaints and performed two language tasks (naming-by-definition and sentence comprehension). Greater language complaints were associated with two language measures, thus showing a moderate value in predicting language performance. Greater relative severity of language versus memory complaints was a better predictor, associated with three language performance measures. Surprisingly, greater memory complaints were associated with better naming, probably due to anosognosia in further disease progression or personality-related factors. Our findings highlight the importance of relative complaint severity across domains and, clinically, call for developing self-assessment questionnaires asking specific questions about multiple cognitive functions.

KEYWORDS:

• Mild cognitive impairment
• aging
• subjective cognitive complaints
• subjective language complaints
• language deficits

Acknowledgments

We sincerely thank all study participants. We thank Daria Zharikova and Elena Savinova for their contributions to stimuli development, Anastasiya Spiridonova and Olga Lekareva for their help with data collection, and Ekaterina Averyanova, Ekaterina Chulina, Aleksandra Morozova, Gloriya Rozovskaya and Kristina Subbotina for their help with data processing.

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author.

Notes

^1. To ensure that the results were not driven by stimuli with the lowest name agreement, we re-run the statistical analyses of the naming-by-definition task excluding the stimuli with name agreement < 90%. The results were similar to those based on the full data, leaving the conclusions unchanged, and are presented in Online Supplement 2.

Additional information

Funding

Study design, data collection and analysis were implemented at the Mental Health Clinic No. 1 named after N.A. Alexeev of Moscow Healthcare Department as part of the state assignment “Neurocognitive training as part of medical rehabilitation of patients with neurodegenerative cognitive impairments of various severity” (EGISU NIOKTR registration number 123031600063-1). Development of linguistic methodology and creation of linguistic stimuli were an output of a research project implemented as part of the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE University).