Do not Test but POBAV (ENTERTAIN) - Written Intentional Naming of Pictures and their Recall as a Brief Cognitive Test
Abstract
Aim: Physicians and other professionals who do not have enough time or experience to assess cognitive functions by simple evaluation wish to have an access to a brief and simple assessment tool. Therefore, we developed an original Czech test that would quickly assess speech, long-term semantic and short-term visual memory.
Material and methods: We examined 30 patients with mild dementia due to Alzheimer disease (AD) according to NIA-AA criteria (Mini-Mental State Examination, MMSE 23 +/- +/- 3 points), and 30 normal elderly adults (MMSE 29 +/- 1 point) matched for age, education and gender. Their task in our new test was to write down and simultaneously remember names of 20 line drawings.
Participants were then immediately asked to recall and write down as many picture names as possible. Results: AD patients made signifi cantly more mistakes in naming pictures than normal elderly adults (3 vs. 0 error) (p = 0.001).
Even greater diff erence between these two groups was observed for the number of correctly recalled picture names (3 vs. 9 pictures) (p 1 error (sensitivity Se 59%, specifi city Sp 83%, area under the receiver operating curve (AUC) of 0.77) or = 6 correctly recalled picture names (Se 100%, Sp 97%, AUC 0.99). The number of naming errors or correctly recalled picture names in normal elderly adults were independent of age, education and gender.
Conclusion: The novel POBAV (PICNIC) test of naming and recalling pictures is easy to administer, yet a challenging examination exploring multiple cognitive functions to detect mild dementia due to AD. The data collection sheet for a written version is available at www.nudz.cz/adcentrum.