Abstract
Aim: The aim of the study was to present the second version of the innovative Amnesia Light and Brief Assessment (ALBA) test and to verify how the results change during repeated testing with different or same versions of the ALBA test. Participants and methods: First, we created version 2 according to the same principles as the first version.
We performed 120 examinations in 30 patients with mild impairment of cognitive functions (Mini-Mental State Examination 25 +- 4) and 30 cognitively normal individuals (age 74 +- 7 years, education 15 +- 3 years, 70% women) using both versions in 3-month intervals. Twenty patients with cognitive impairment were examined with two identical versions 40x in 4-month intervals.
Results: Compared to cognitively normal individuals, patients with mild impairment of cognitive functions had significantly lower numbers of correctly recalled sentence words (median 3.5 vs. 1.5), gestures (5 vs. 2.5) and their sum as the ALBA score (8 vs. 4.5) in the new version 2 of the ALBA test (P < 0.01). The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve was 0.8.
The sensitivity was 70% and the specificity was 77% at the cut-off score of version 2 of the ALBA test at <= 6 points. The numbers of correctly recalled gestures (median 4 vs. 4) or the sum of correctly recalled words and gestures (median 8 vs. 7) did not differ between versions 1 and 2 of the ALBA test, but not regarding the numbers of correctly recalled words with a minimal and clinically insignificant difference (median 4 vs. 3; P = 0.02).
The correlation of ALBA scores between the two versions was significant (r = 0.6). The number of words, gestures or their sum remained similar in the second examination using the same version.
Conclusion: Test forms of two versions of the unique ALBA test are available for a quick examination of memory in the Czech Republic which can be freely downloaded from www.abadeco.cz. The same or parallel version of the ALBA test can be used for repeated testing after 3 months.